


Rogue

by Eloarei



Series: Rogue [1]
Category: Hanna Is Not A Boy's Name
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Historical, Backstory, Blood Magic, Character Death, Demonic Possession, Grim Reapers, M/M, Necromancy, Religious Themes, Universe Alteration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-15
Updated: 2017-03-10
Packaged: 2018-05-01 17:37:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 141,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5214689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eloarei/pseuds/Eloarei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A confused zombie shows up at a paranormal investigator's door, that much we all know. But what Mr. Hanna Falk Cross isn't letting on is that he knew the zombie back when he was alive, some hundred-odd years ago. Kind of a hard thing to admit to friends, when you look sixteen and you're always telling people you're twenty-four, but he's gonna have to, if he wants any help figuring out why his old partner has suddenly come back with amnesia. Is it an answered prayer, or a curse from his necromantic past come back to haunt him?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was my 2014 NaNoWriMo project, which, 2.4 years later, is FINALLY finished!  
> Endless thanks to everyone who's helped me keep going, and all of you as well!

Twenty-four was a ruse. A compromise, really, between that god-awful eternal sixteen, and the several centuries he didn't look a minute of. He wasn't called on it very often, but he'd gotten used to handling accusations of untruth when they arose, practiced as he was from skirting around his other compromises.  
  
That didn't make him a liar. No, no, he actually hated lying, hated deceiving people who had otherwise earned his trust. But it wasn't because he didn't trust people that he told them he was twenty-four, and not some-hundred. It was because, well, it was for their safety! The less they knew about him the better, wasn't it? Surely.  
  
Still... He felt a bit bad about it all, about leading his 'friends' on to think he was someone he wasn't. He always had. So he never stayed in one place for long. Too hard to confess, much easier to pack up and move.  
  
Maybe it was almost time again. He'd known Worth for years; probably... oh, three or four by now? Maybe five. It was a long time for normal humans, he had to remind himself. Long enough that soon Worth would start wondering about his young friend's stunted growth and bad luck with ghosts. Well, Lamont might wonder, at least. The grungy doctor likely wouldn't give a damn if the young man looked sixteen until the day he died of old age (not that that was probably ever going to happen).  
  
' _I've gotten careless,'_ he thought. _'I always took care of myself just fine, back in the day, didn't I? Too tempting to slip up though, when you know you've got someone to patch you up.'_ Although the doc grumbled every time the young man wandered into his office, there was a genuine kindheartedness somewhere underneath it all, and he was more grateful than he could say for it.  
  
' _Maybe it_ is _time to move on. Before I get too comfortable. Otherwise I'll just--'_  
  
He looked up from his cheap plastic bowl, chopstick'd clump of chow mein poised just an inch or so from his open mouth. A wave ran over him, through him, chilling him to his black, half-human core. Preparing for trouble, he skittered from his springy thread-bare spot on the couch, bare feet hitting the floor with a pillow-soft 'whumph', and grabbed up the closest wield-able heavy object. The rarely used frying pan hummed in his hand as he scribbled a tiny rune on the flat side and stalked slowly to the front door of his ramshackle apartment.  
  
Hunched up next to the door, breath as quiet as he could manage, he waited and shivered as the familiar old feeling washed over him like an oil spill. His teeth chattered as he wondered viciously, animalistically defensive in his home, what could be coming for its dues, after so long.  
  
' _It's too late, again. I should've moved on months ago,'_ he thought. ' _This always happens.'_  
  
Studying the signature radiating from the evil whatever-it-was slowly ascending the stairs (towards him, he knew, paranoid but sure), he braced himself for an attack... and then almost relaxed as confusion set in with the dawning of recognition.  
  
He gritted his teeth subconsciously as another type of horror set in. This aura... It couldn't be... Could it?  
  
He set the pan down, then quickly picked it back up, wished he had something more conventionally dangerous, counted a few perceived steps while the aura drew closer, and set the pan down again as memory and hope seeped in.  
  
The problem was... there was no way he should be happy about this, and _no_ way he should let his guard down. Chances were this was some demon from his past, using a familiar scent to trick him. It wasn't as if people hadn't tried before. Even if, somehow... _god_. There was just no way. It was outside his door now, just waiting there, and he hadn't picked back up his stupid flimsy little pan, couldn't bring himself to, even though, honestly, without the rune he didn't have the muscle to even stagger someone, let alone really harm.  
  
He decided to stand back from the door, along the far wall of the kitchen, which was neither very far from the front door, nor going to stop a wraith or something from destroying him if that was its mission. He waited there for a minute, frowning at the door and toying with the curly cord of the telephone he never bothered to set up service for, before there was finally a knock.  
  
It was just a knock. It wasn't menacing, or loud enough to alert his land-lady. It didn't sound like the practiced, cheerful knock of a door-to-door solicitor. Just sounded like the knock of a stranger calling upon a service they saw advertised somewhere, which he'd think it was, if the thing on the other side didn't absolutely reek of a rare kind of magic he knew all too well.  
  
For a moment, he considered waiting for the person or thing to go away, but then realized that was sort of stupid, because if it was a violent spirit bent on retribution, it wasn't going to just give up if he pretended he wasn't home, and if it was just a human client (or a humanoid one, at least) then he had nothing to fear and would just be an idiot for passing up the opportunity to potentially get paid. (In all honesty, he didn't strictly _need_ money; he could probably charm Mrs. Blaney into forgetting to make him pay rent, either magically or otherwise, but there was no need to further complicate life if he _could_ pay; and he didn't exactly _have to_ eat, but food was one of the few things that made life worth living anymore, so he wasn't planning on giving that up if he had a choice.)  
  
But as he took the several forcibly-calm calculated steps to the front door, he couldn't help but admit the real reason he _had_ to answer the knock was the dark gaping hole in his chest that was full of failure, loneliness, and other things that meant soul-devouring emptiness.  
  
It didn't get any better when he saw the man's face.  
  
“Hanna... Cross?” the man asked, sounding skeptical.  
  
“That's... me,” he replied, also skeptical, and more than a little stunned to see his fearful hopes sort of confusingly be true.  
  
The man (and Hanna thought it was fair enough to call him that; he called his vampire clients men and women, and his werewolf clients, and his ghost clients, even when, honestly, they looked more like ghoulish nightmares. People couldn't help how they looked and, really, Hanna didn't want to be a hypocrite) seemed to scrutinize him for a minute, eyebrows curved concave (or was it convex?) up to the crease in the middle of his grey-greenish forehead. “I was told you could help me with this.” He gestured vaguely downward with his pointed nose, leaving his hands stuck in his trench-coat pockets.  
  
Hanna looked at him. He looked at his orange canvas shoes. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, other than the fact that a man in his early thirties was _wearing_ orange canvas shoes in combination with otherwise dressy attire. Then again, his shirt was a similar color orange as well, so it wasn't that strange. Actually, the outfit looked pretty good on him, though with his skin color it made him look overall a bit like a pumpkin. A tall pumpkin. The outfit wasn't the problem. No, he knew what the problem was, but hell if he wasn't going to be obtuse when a piece of his past strolled right up to his door a few centuries too late and didn't even recognize him.  
  
“You're gonna have to be a little more specific,” he told the man, crossing his arms because he didn't know what else to do with them, and then uncrossing them again because he didn't want to look too hostile. He _felt_ hostile. And paranoid. ' _Good god. What the fuck? What the serious actual fuck?'_ was what his mind was saying at the moment, and about the best his body could do was not let his mouth follow suit. He was supposed to be somewhat of a businessman, after all.  
  
The man paused for a space of time that would probably have been filled with a deep frustrated breath if he had been breathing. “I'm dead. I'm walking around. I don't think this is normal.”  
  
“Depends on who you hang out with,” Hanna said, almost to himself. “Did you say someone told you about me? I sort of run a referral program, so...” (He didn't really have a referral program, at least not officially, although he supposed he'd give a customer a discount for referring someone if, geez, any of his repeat clients ever really paid him to begin with.)  
  
“Sorry, I... don't actually remember.” The tall greenish man looked down at Hanna and quirked his eyebrows again in a way that Hanna assumed, based on context, meant he was sorry.  
  
“s'okay,” Hanna said, shrugging and remembering a time when he spoke properly and not like a small redhead version of Worth. “What did you say your name was?” Vaguely, in the back of his mind somewhere, Hanna took the time to be grateful to whatever part of his brain made his autopilot function ( _reasonably_ well; “referral program” was perhaps stretching it), because if he'd been actually consciously thinking, what came out of his mouth would have been more along the lines of screaming and crying than actual words, and the words he did manage would likely fuck up everything.  
  
The man looked nearly ashamed as he admitted, “I don't remember that either.” Hanna wasn't surprised. Actually, 'wasn't surprised' was an understatement. This man could _not know_ his name. For him to be standing there, looking like death and smelling like an ancient forbidden magic, regardless of how almost-normally he was dressed, there was no way he could know his name.  
  
A thought struck Hanna then that terrified him more than this man's sudden appearance, the thought that this could be his fault.  
  
It _was_ his fault, and he couldn't deny it to himself, that this man had died in the first place. God, it had taken him decades to stop dwelling on it. But it was in the past, and there was nothing he could do about it, when the only way to fix the problem was more of what had sort of caused it in the first place. Except, here he was, walking, talking, maybe not breathing exactly, but doing a pretty good impersonation of a living person, aside from the skin color and the smell. (Not that most normal folks would notice that; it took sort of a practiced nose to pick it out.)  
  
What if he _had_ caused this, somehow, accidentally, subconsciously even? He'd long ago left off the dark magic. Right about the time this tall stubbly man now standing in his doorway had taken his last breath. But magic was weird. It had a mind of its own. Sometimes he didn't feel so much that he was a magical person as he did that he was simply a vessel for the magic to work through.  
  
“You don't need my name to help me, do you?” the man asked.  
  
“No, oh no,” Hanna answered nonchalantly. “Pfft, naw, no name needed, nope.”  
  
' _And no name wanted either, John Doe,'_ he thought. Because, really, it didn't matter (yes it did, it really did, but for this moment, 'it didn't matter') who was the cause of this man's reawakening, just that he _was_ awake, and Hanna wanted to keep it that way. He wanted the man here with him, so he had time to atone for his mistakes, so he could show him he'd changed, so he could ask for forgiveness.  
  
None of that was likely to happen, because the zombie (good lord, he was a zombie, a fucking zombie) didn't remember him or his mistakes or probably anything, and reminding him would be a big ol' can of worms not worth the chance to apologize.  
  
Instead, Hanna would settle for keeping him around for the more purely selfish reason of simply wanting him there. He could do better this time around; he led a safer life, one less likely to cause casualties, and not only because a large number of his current acquaintances were not strictly mortal. Sure, he got into trouble ...fairly often, but not like he did when his job literally revolved around death. He'd calmed down. He'd shook off most of his pursuers. He was _incognito_ now and could maybe risk having friends and partners again. (Perhaps he'd just been telling himself otherwise, not 10 minutes before, but that was, well, _before_.)  
  
And this time the man... could... maybe... stay with him for good.  
  
As long as he didn't know his name.  
  
Hanna forced his brain back into some semblance of focus and turned back to his friend. The man. The man he'd never met because he was just a client that showed up at his door. The zombie. The tall pumpkin. The greenish fellow. “Um, so, what was it you wanted my help with?”  
  
The man raised his eyebrows a bit, as if it should have been obvious. (Hanna noted that his expressions, while still pretty easy to read, didn't really rely on his mouth or cheeks or eyes, which all mostly stayed in a flat, neutral position and left the work to the eyebrows.) “An explanation, maybe?”  
  
' _Ugh, right, explanation,'_ Hanna thought. _'Guess his memory loss didn't affect his personality.'_ Not that the man couldn't take things at face value, but if there was an explanation to be had, typically, he was going to have it. Now the trick, in this case, was to come up with an explanation that was both truthful and not incriminating.  
  
“Well, you're a zombie,” he said for starters. He didn't receive any feedback for that groundbreaking news, so he continued, hoping the right words would come to him as they fell out of his mouth. “You were dead, and... now you're undead. Probably someone brought you back for, y'know, some reason.”  
  
The zombie man seemed to be taking the news rather well, although it was most likely because he'd figured that much out on his own. His eyebrows stayed mostly still. “Wouldn't that person be having me do their bidding?”  
  
_'I'm not sure they're not,'_ Hanna thought, cringing internally. Whether his subconscious or a different magic user, someone had compelled the undead man to come here. There was just no way he'd have woken up and decided to go visit an old friend on his own. No, someone wanted him here, and that was probably a bad thing.  
  
Hanna tilted his head from side to side, like he wasn't absolutely totally sure about it. “Mm, maybe.”  
  
“I have to know.”  
  
At that, Hanna found he could no longer avoid the man's eyes, as previously he'd been able not to look quite directly at them. But they were bright, and orangey-brown, sort of glowy. He searched them for a moment, a bit against his will, because he wanted to see him, and he wanted to not see him, and he didn't know which would be worse, but it didn't matter because there he was now, looking. His eyes were soulful, and Hanna was relieved. Still he was scared, as is any liar when the truth is on the line.  
  
“Why?” he asked.  
  
The man inclined his head so that his eyes were directed with a laser-focus at Hanna's. “Because I don't want to be a puppet.”  
  
Hanna's heart broke a little, and the pieces dropped into his stomach. How very like him that was, to demand autonomy. And how rightful. Hanna wanted that too, for him, that freedom, and it was painful the possibility that he was the cause of the man's lack of free will, that his own mind may have done this, and that he was consciously perpetuating it at this very moment by not freeing him of it even though he knew how. It would be simple, ABC simple, just a name and he'd have back control. And memories, probably. And therein lie the problem. Because Hanna was selfish, and scared, and as the seconds ticked by in this man's presence, he realized more with each one just how lonely he'd been. Lonely enough, scared enough, selfish enough to risk the fact that some warlock with a grudge may be using his old friend to get back at Hanna for transgressions long past.  
  
Luckily, he was also confident enough that he could handle it, particularly now that he had a reason. The past century or so, he'd really scaled back the types and intensity of magic he'd used, but he figured it was... like riding a bike, for lack of better modern metaphor. No, the magic shouldn't be the problem. Hanna would take care of this warlock or whoever it was that was after him (as he had increasingly convinced himself was the case because malicious meddling was the only plausible excuse for all this), but in the meantime he might have to recruit some friends to help with the finer, more inter-personal details, the sneaking and excuse-making. And he knew a few fellows who were particularly apt at that sort of thing.  
  
“I think I'm gonna have to, uh, consult a colleague about this.”  
  
So the man followed him back down the rickety staircase, quietly past the front office, and down the street, not even questioning why they were going to visit this colleague instead of simply phoning them up, but that most likely had more to do with not being entirely sure what phones were than being a trusting and easy-going individual, though that also happened to be the case.  
  
As they walked, with purpose but not in a hurry (Hanna set the pace, and his quiet friend was considerate enough to match his speed with a slow, comfortable stride instead of rushing him with impatient little steps, as tall people seemed wont to do when unused to walking beside those of shorter statures), Hanna couldn't help but feel a bit nostalgic. He didn't mean to let it happen; this whole ordeal would be a lot easier on him if he could just ignore his past and whatever feelings it wrought, at least until the mess was sorted out. Of course, pangs of nostalgia weren't the sort of thing one planned, and usually popped up at inopportune moments like when you were trying to pretend you didn't know someone but couldn't help remembering that you'd walked down dark streets like this many times before, and it made your face break into a lonely, bittersweet expression. But the tall man was at his shoulder, and there was a good foot of distance between their eyes, and it was the murky 2am dark of the rundown inner-city streets, so it wasn't likely he could see. (Though his eyes did glow slightly, like an owl... if owls' eyes glowed, so maybe the dark was not an issue to him.)  
  
It wasn't far to their destination, particularly not for Hanna, who frequented the place not only with magical and medical concerns, but whenever he was bored, so he was there nearly as often as he was at his own home. ('Home' still seemed like an inaccurate word for the place. You were supposed to feel comfortable at home; Hanna hadn't felt comfortable anywhere for years, let alone that ramshackle apartment.) They were turning down the familiar back-alley in a matter of minutes, and soon-after barging in without so much as a knock, as was customary. (But not 'customer-y'. Customers knocked.)  
  
Worth was kicked back at his desk, reading, legs crossed at the ankles on top of piles of papers on top of the crooked desk on top of stacked books which were trying desperately to keep the whole thing level, but mostly being squished under the weight. He looked up lazily, since he knew only friends and 'friends' came in without knocking, but he dropped his book in his lap when he noticed who or what Hanna had brought along.  
  
“Jeezus Christ, Hanna, this one's deader 'n usual! This is some straight up necromancer shit. Y' haven't gone _rogue_ , have ya?”  
  
Hanna proceeded to laugh (nervously, though he hoped no one noticed), cross his arms, and send Worth the friendliest dirty look he could manage. Then he didn't deny it. “He came to me for help.”  
  
The doctor swung his legs down to the floor and stood up with his palms flat on the desk top. “Help? Looks like he's been 'helped' already. He's walkin', ain't he? Not sure what else we could do for 'im.”  
  
The zombie shook his head, nearly the most abrupt movement Hanna had seen from him thus far (not counting the past, because they really weren't counting that). “I want to know who did this to me.”  
  
Worth shrugged and directed his answer at Hanna. “I guess yer wantin' my connections then, huh?”  
  
Hanna nodded. “You are the man with the connections,” he said.  
  
Worth crossed his arms, yawned, and studied the zombie. “I ain't no magic-user though. T' track down a sorcerer yer gonna need a good spell too.”  
  
“I got that covered,” Hanna insisted with a cheesy smile and a thumbs-up. Worth looked unsure and leveled a judgmental eye at his young friend. (Oh, 'young'; yet another unintentionally inaccurate word.) Hanna met his gaze, and they stared at each other a long moment or two. Their guest waited patiently in the awkward silence until Hanna turned to him and smiled almost apologetically. “You wanna have a seat or something? I need to talk to Worth for a minute. Privately. If that's cool with you.”  
  
The man shrugged his head a little and turned to obediently scan the room for a chair. Hanna grabbed Worth by the arm of his grungy once-white coat and tugged him into the back, winding through the small maze of interconnected rooms until they were as far from Hanna's friend as possible. He flicked on the light and closed the door behind them. Worth frowned to find them squished together in the cramped bathroom and pushed past Hanna to sit heavily on the toilet, rolling his eyes. (Whoever had used the bathroom last had put both the seat and lid down, which probably meant it hadn't been either him or Lamont; he wondered briefly when the last time was that he was drunk enough not to notice someone else using his toilet.) He lit a cigarette. “Alright kid, what's got yer knickers in a twist now?”  
  
Hanna shifted back and forth on his feet, unsure where to start and how far to go. “This, uh, case. It's different from any other case I've had.”  
  
“Yeah, I imagine so,” Worth said, looking vaguely bored. “Most 'a yer clients are regular humans, ain't they? Or mostly livin', anyway.”  
  
“Eh, that's not exactly true.” Although Hanna really didn't want to go into much more detail about that; Worth always got onto him about dealing with ghosts. The man could be like a mother hen sometimes. “But it's... not that.”  
  
“Then speak the hell up,” Worth grumbled. “I ain't got all day. A customer could walk in any time and I don't want that green-ass client 'a yers bein' the first person they see.”  
  
A hesitant rumble built up in Hanna's throat and he bit his lip, stuck between his desire to be honest and his desire not to complicate things further. “Yeeeaah, I.... knew him? Before.”  
  
“Before?” Worth raised an eyebrow at the rather uninteresting admission. “What? Before ya met me? Ya'll two didn't look that chummy.”  
  
“He doesn't remember me,” Hanna admitted, unable to stop a bit of that wiggly depressing emotion he was feeling from leaking out along with the words.  
  
Worth didn't seem to see the problem. “And ya didn't try to jog his memory?”  
  
Hanna gave a really unpleasant 'smile', canines showing and eyebrows raised but not a hint of actual positive emotion. “Ehhhh..., no?”  
  
“Well why the hell n--,” Worth started, tired of Hanna's non-answers. Then his mind started sorting through everything he'd ever learned about necromancy and his eyes narrowed ever so slowly.  
  
Hanna stood frozen under Worth's scrutinizing glare, like a proverbial deer about to be proverbially hit by a 16-wheeler.  
“Hanna, you little shit!”  
  
“I didn't mean to!” Hanna pled, holding his hands up in the small space between them. “Heck, I'm not even sure it was me! I mean, if it was me, I definitely didn't do it on purpose! He just showed up at my door tonight, I swear!”  
  
Worth growled, and Hanna would have been more worried if it had been a less common noise from the doctor. “I don't really give a shit about that! But I've been tellin' ya fer years that necromancy's bad business, an' you din't once say nothin'. Yer a better liar 'n I gave you credit for.” He raised a single eyebrow at Hanna, like he was seeing the idiot magic-user in a whole new light and wasn't sure exactly how much he approved, but that it was likely on the positive side, at least a little.  
  
“I was trying to put it behind me,” Hanna said, honest remorse creeping up into his voice.  
  
Worth didn't say anything for a minute, just stood there with his cigarette hanging between his lips on the side of his mouth that was not curled into an uncomfortable frown. It seemed likely he was debating whether or not to point out how wrong Hanna's actions had been (even though he didn't know the half of it), but eventually he let out a puff of smoke with a sigh, presumably figuring Hanna had learned his lesson, and said, “Well, whaddya want me to do?”  
  
Relief that Worth wasn't going to turn this into a lecture flooded Hanna. “I want you to help me figure out the truth. Er, but I wanna sort of keep the details on the down-low until I really know what happened.”  
  
“Y'mean you wanna keep yer little friend out there from figurin' out what a shithead you are.” Worth took a puff and leaned back, digesting the situation. Hanna knew he wasn't really mad, but that he just didn't like being misinformed, and the whole past few years between them was turning out to have been a massive omission of information, if not entirely _mis_ information.  
  
Hanna put on his best puppy-dog eyes, which wasn't hard at this point, because he honestly did feel bad about what a fuck-up he was. Not _sorry_ , because that implied a desire to change, but still bad. “Yeah, basically. It's just, I screwed up, I know, but I wanna try to fix things before I admit it to him. He was my friend once.”  
  
“Hnn, yeah? Guy's been dead, what?, ten years, looks like?”  
  
“Yeah, maybe a little more than that?” Worth gave Hanna that look, that ' _son, you best stop lyin'a me_ ' look, and Hanna cringed, but figured he may as well be perfectly honest with _someone_ tonight. “Maybe more like a hundred-somethin'?”  
  
A look passed over Worth's face for just a moment that was like the little brother of murderous rage, but it quickly dropped into more of a ' _you know what? Fuck it'_ , as he exhaled the breath he'd been holding. “Pretty composed fer such a old corpse.”  
  
“I put a preservation charm on him,” Hanna said, looking into the grungy bathroom mirror but not really seeing himself, remembering the past but not really seeing that either.  
  
Worth was quiet a moment, as he observed Hanna through his little cloud of smoke. “Alright, so you want me to babysit him while you play detective?”  
  
“Would you?” Hanna asked, perking up. “Just while I do the summoning? Just in case the reaper's not in the mood to keep secrets.” He didn't bother explaining the process to Worth because he knew Worth was colloquially familiar with most basic magic processes and could put together the rest of it with little help. The man was almost frighteningly quick, particularly when it came to magic; it was a little surprising he'd never gotten into the field himself, although Hanna suspected it was mostly because he couldn't be bothered.  
  
“Yeah, alright,” Worth said, looking like he didn't want to agree to be helpful but was physically incapable of actually turning Hanna down (which Hanna knew was pretty close to the truth). “Ya really think yer reaper's gonna have any secrets fer you to keep?”  
  
He wasn't asking if the reaper would _know_ the secrets-- even though he was pretty sure Worth had never met a reaper, anyone who knew people in the supernatural community knew someone who knew one and knew that reapers knew pretty much everything-- he was asking if what the reaper knew was worth considering a secret, and the problem was that Hanna _didn't know_. That really was _the problem_. “God, I have no idea,” he admitted. “But I don't wanna take the chance that they-- oh man, it's been so long since I've dealt with one, I almost forgot! Reapers are weirdly formal-- they always address people by name when they greet them, so, yeah, that is a _huge_ secret!”  
  
“A secret name? 's there somethin' else yer not tellin' me, 'side from apparently bein' a hundred year-old necromancer.”  
  
“ _Ex-_ necromancer,” Hanna said, distaste obvious in his expression and tone of voice, although perhaps not for the reason Worth was probably thinking. “It's _his_ name that's the problem. You know how it is. Names have power.”  
  
“ _His_ name,” Worth mimicked. “I'm guessin' you mean the zombie. Yer not even gonna tell me what it is, are ya?”  
  
Hanna shook his head, apologetic but firm. “I'm not even gonna _think_ it, if I can. I don't wanna risk it.”  
  
“Yeah, yeah, I'm gettin' that,” Worth grumbled from behind his cigarette.  
  
“Thanks,” Hanna said, and he really really meant it.  
  
Worth looked away from the too-earnest look on Hanna's face. “Whatever, kid. Let's just get this over with so I can go about adjustin' to my unwanted new knowledge 'bout you in peace. Whaddya need fer yer summonin' or what-have-ya?”  
  
Hanna thought back to all the old rituals he'd once been well-versed in. Reaper summoning... Right. Reaper summoning was the one that was either particularly difficult or particularly easy, depending on the resources you had available to you. Currently he had at least one of the resources he needed sitting barely a foot away from him, although given Worth's opinion of necromancy (a part of which reaper summoning was usually considered), Hanna wasn't sure he'd actually be able to take advantage of it, and he was _long_ past taking without permission. (In truth, he'd _never_ liked using non-willing participants if he could help it, but he'd stopped doing so entirely even before he'd first met his _un_ -undead friend, and hadn't done so since. For the most part.) But Worth, much like a mangy dog, could all but smell fear, so Hanna steeled his face into an expression he hoped exuded confidence and, moreover, _morality,_ and told Worth, “Well, your blood, for starters.”  
  
_'Morality!'_ Hanna thought again, as Worth seemed to chew on the idea of donating his blood for Hanna's cause, looking as if it tasted like a fatty piece of gristle he couldn't spit out.  
  
“What else?” he asked, and Hanna was a bit surprised, though he couldn't tell if Worth's question meant he'd agreed or was still metaphorically chewing, maybe looking for a bite of something else to make the gristle go down smoother.  
  
“The blood of a vampire?” Hanna said, accidentally making it sound like a question, which typically did not make one sound as if they were very confident about their idea or really know what they were doing exactly. “I kinda thought maybe Lamont could get us some. Oh! The blood doesn't necessarily have to come from you, actually, I could get it from Lamont! It just has to be, uh, mortal blood. And the other blood doesn't have to be from a vampire exactly, I just think it's probably easier to get than, say, demi-god blood. Unless you know any other immortals.”  
  
Worth made a face like, ' _Ain't I lookin' at one?'_ so Hanna quickly waved a hand and amended his statement. “Like, uh, a _normal_ immortal. Mine won't work. The reapers say I, uh, smell funny.”  
  
“Uh-huh.” Worth seemed uninterested in his excuses and totally interested in moving the heck on. He tapped out his cigarette ashes in the grungy sink. “I'll call up 'Mont and let 'im know. What else ya need?”  
  
“Bones? Or bone powder. The older the better. The vampire blood's actually supposed to be the hard part in this one.”  
  
“Nah, shouldn' be too difficult,” Worth said as he stood and flicked the last bit of his cigarette into the (empty? Wow. And miraculously almost clean) tub to smolder itself to death. He nudged past Hanna back out into the winding hall towards the front room and his desk, where his only phone was sitting probably off the hook on the floor somewhere underneath. “Monty's picked up a few more clients recently. 'm sure he can work out a trade with one of 'em.”  
  
“I hope so,” Hanna said, chewing lightly on his lower lip as he followed Worth. “Vamps don't usually like to share their blood with just anyone.” And, as he'd previously reminded himself, he was done taking without permission. The last time had worked out okay-- nobody had _died_ \-- although, actually, no, that wasn't quite true. Well, it had turned out alright, anyway, but he still would rather not have to steal a vampire's blood, especially for something that was not literally life-or-death.  
  
He'd fallen a few yards behind Worth, because goodness that man's legs were long and he could get places in a hurry when he wasn't pretending to be a complete layabout, so he heard the man talking to someone before he saw them talking. At first he'd assumed Worth was chatting with his 'new zombie friend', but even Worth was not usually outright rude to people he wasn't fairly familiar with, and his tone of voice was much like the one he used with Lamont when they were antagonizing each other, so Hanna assumed that it was Lamont who had conveniently come by with the good timing he was somewhat known for, until he heard the responding voice, which was both higher pitched and higher strung than their resident deliverer-of-goods, who tended to sound more or less like he was waking up from a good nap even when he was in the middle of a heated argument.  
  
A second or two later, Hanna rounded the corner and found Worth bickering comfortably (a style of bickering Hanna thought only Worth and those who fought with him could manage) with a very pale vampire, who certainly was not Lamont. They paused when they saw Hanna, and the vampire acknowledged him with the very minimal amount of politeness required (which was still more than he got from a lot of people; this was the city, after all, and the sorts he dealt with often claimed to be too fed up with 'this shit' (usually meaning the generalities of life, Hanna gathered) to be bothered).  
  
“Your new assistant?” he asked Worth, nodding in Hanna's direction. “Or maybe the long-awaited exterminator?”  
  
“Colleague 'a mine,” Worth answered, not rising to the bait, most likely because he'd heard it a million times before. “Hanna Cross. Introduce yerself, Connie. A 'lil more human inneraction won't kill ya, probably.”  
  
The vampire scowled in immediate response (so immediate, Hanna was fairly certain it didn't even matter what Worth said, he'd have scowled anyway) and turned as if he were going to take the suggestion and introduce himself... before the name and small stature and curly red hair caught up with him and his scowl became a wide-eyed hostile glare.  
  
“Hanna fucking Cross? You're kidding me.”  
  
It was then that recognition hit Hanna as well. And he'd just been thinking about when he'd first met Conrad Achenleck, the last time he'd taken a vampire's blood without permission. He was a little surprised at himself that he didn't recognize Conrad immediately, although it had been decades ago, and the man was a little bit less, uh, beatnik than he remembered him.  
  
“Uh, long time no see, Conrad,” Hanna said, waving awkwardly.  
  
“How the fuck are you still sixteen?!”  
  
Well, it was good to see that Conrad hadn't changed much since contracting vampirism. 'How is that even possible?!' and other variations of such disbelieving exclamations were among the things Hanna had heard most from Conrad's mouth during the short time they'd spent together. Correction, 'How the _fuck_ is that even possible?!'. He was a very seeing-isn’t-necessarily-believing kind of guy, the sort that had a problem taking things at face value, even if they were right _in_ his face. Hanna would have expected him to be a little less surprised about the existence of weird, supernatural-y things once he adjusted to being one himself, but some people were just stubborn like that, he guessed.  
  
“I'm twenty-four,” he said, nonchalant. “So what are you doing here? You're friends with Worth? Man, that's crazy. Never would've expected that.”  
  
Conrad wasn't having it. “No, _how the fuck are you still sixteen?!_ And I am _not_ friends with Worth. I just buy blood from him.”  
  
Worth chuckled gruffly. “'Cuz he's too much of a pussy t' go out 'n get his own.”  
  
“Just give me the blood, you hack! I'm starving!” Conrad held out a small stack of bills and waved them impatiently. Worth grumbled a good-natured sort of 'yeah, yeah' under his breath and took the money from the man's pale fist, heading into one of the back rooms where he kept his stock. The vampire turned his wide eyes back to Hanna, looking like he was angry that the mage's existence didn't fit neatly into his clean, cultivated mental view of the world. “How do you still look the same as you did fifty fucking years ago? You're not a vampire.”  
  
“Magic?” Hanna offered.  
  
Conrad seemed to want to protest that, although he knew it was technically a plausible reason and wasn't well-versed enough in the intricacies of the rules of magic to really argue. Worth came back with a bag of blood packets as he was opening his mouth to fire off some denial of Hanna's excuse, so he said instead, “Thank _God_. I was about to-”  
  
“What?” Worth interrupted with a cocky smirk. “Bite yer own wrist, ya pansy?”  
  
The vampire glared, but with less vitriol than he might have if he weren't sinking his fangs into the top of a pouch. “Shut up, Worth,” he said around the punctured plastic.  
  
Hanna was interested to catch up with Conrad again after so long, since he usually didn't get to keep in touch with his clients, but at this moment he was more interested in getting back to the real problem he was facing. (Conrad was a vampire, and apparently competent enough of one to survive _this_ long, so he'd be around to talk to once Hanna had gotten the current situation in order. Technically, all of them here (aside from Worth) were likely to be around for a good long time, so it didn't _really_ matter what order he did things in, but solving the case with 'his new friend, the zombie' was more than first priority right now, it was the _only_ priority. It would be looming over him until he knew for sure what had happened and what was going to happen. It would probably loom over him forever, even if everything worked out perfectly, because no matter how great things went from then on out, there was no changing the past or erasing decades of guilt. He had to get this figured out.) He scooted behind Conrad, who was still bickering with Worth, and found his zombie (what? God, why did he think that? _His?_ ) sitting with admirable posture in one of the less rickety chairs near the door.  
  
“Heyyy,” Hanna said, coming up to stand diagonal to him. “Sorry to leave you here. I just needed to work out some details with Worth.”  
  
“It's not a problem,” the man said (and, geez, Hanna really needed a name for him-- if he had _some_ name to think of him by then he was less likely to accidentally... fuck things up hardcore, which was still a major concern of his at this point). He tilted his head up just slightly to look at Hanna, who stood less than a foot taller than him when he was sitting, and Hanna wondered casually if he'd ever have gotten to a normal height if he continued growing past the age of barely-pubescent. “Do you have what you need?”  
  
“Uh, not yet. Worth's gotta get in contact with one of his, well, contacts, and it could be days before he can get all the ingredients for us, so, y'know.” He shrugged in apology of the delay. “I hope you don't mind waiting.”  
  
The zombie shrugged his own response, probably not in that much of a hurry after having been dead for 'however' long, and probably not in that much of a hurry because he'd always been a patient sort of fellow. Though a moment after his shrug, a subtle look came over his face that was probably only subtle to people who were not Hanna, people who didn't know the intricacies of the expressions of both the undead and of a gentle, intuitive detective from the 1800's. It was a look of realization that came right before a slightly harder look of determination to solve a problem without inconveniencing anyone more than was strictly necessary. It was kind of a painful expression for Hanna to see, so he preempted it by offering a solution to what he thought was probably the problem his friend was trying to solve. (Or at least he hoped so.)  
  
“You can stay at my place if, y'know, you don't have some other place you'd rather be. While we wait.”  
  
He was worried for a minute that he'd let his hopes get ahead of him and perceived the situation wrong, but then his friend the zombie's posture sagged a comfortable few millimeters and he didn't let out a breath of relief because there was probably no air in his lungs with which to do so, but he smiled up at Hanna and said with a genuineness the magic-user was certain he didn't deserve, “Thank you.”  
  
Hanna had to look away. He crossed his arms, like ' _oh, no big deal_ ', because, hey, it was no big deal, right? And he held the heavy breath of, what was it? Surprise? overwhelm? that threatened to fall out from between his very frowning lips. “Hey, sure,” he said, glad his voice wasn't shaking too bad. “My apartment's kinda, you've seen it, it's not like the Ritz or anything, but mi casa es su casa.”  
  
Of course, the man hadn't had a need to know any Spanish when he was alive, and the phrase hadn't come into popular usage yet, so unless he'd learned Espanol since his reawakening, he probably wasn't going to get that last part, but he seemed to understand what Hanna had meant. Although that brought Hanna to another point, something he'd forgotten to ask earlier that night, even though it probably should have been one of the first things to cover.  
  
“By the way,” he started, clearing his throat of any mucous that had decided to spontaneously gather there upon seeing the zombie smile, “how long have you been, you know, undead?”  
  
“I'm not sure,” the man replied. “My memory is sort of hazy. The first thing I remember is walking down the street toward your apartment. I don't know how I knew to go there. It just seemed like something I had to do.”  
  
“Wait, so, you don't remember anything before tonight?”  
  
He shook his head, if such a subtle motion could be likened to something as dynamic as shaking.  
  
It was a troubling thought, because most of the dead that Hanna had ever raised regained consciousness almost immediately. Ones that didn't 'wake up' from the start usually never did, and there were several reasons for that. Either the necromancer hadn't bothered to bring back the spirit along with the body, because he was planning on using the corpse as a disposable tool that didn't need to bother itself with things like _thinking_ , or he was planning on using it as a disposable tool but the soul refused to separate from the body so he suppressed it. The only other reason a reanimated body wouldn't wake up was if there was no soul _left._ He couldn't decide which idea was the worst.  
  
However, he didn't want to worry his poor client, so he shrugged like that was a totally common problem for the undead to have. “Well maybe we can get some of that figured out with the rest of it,” he offered and then kind of mentally smacked himself because _what?_ Why was he offering to solve more of this mystery? He was just digging himself into more of a hole! Either he told the man that he couldn't find anything out about his past and made himself look like an incompetent loser-- _not to mention_ disappointing him, or he told him the truth and woooaahh was _that_ ever not gonna happen! Geez. He hoped he could find a compromise.  
  
The zombie stood, and the extra height made him seem almost as if he were looming over Hanna, which would have set him on edge if it were anyone else but was actually sort of comforting, being who it was. “I'm not very worried about it,” the man said.  
  
Hanna turned around to more fully face his tall companion and found that at this short distance he had to look up quite a ways, which he felt he would actually like to get used to again. “Er, okay,” Hanna said. Personally he thought it was a bit odd not to want to know your own past, but he certainly wasn't going to force the issue. He turned back toward Worth and found that his and Conrad's conversation was simmering on low heat, and took the opportunity to interrupt. “Hey Worth, we're gonna head back. Tell Lamont I said please and thanks for the bones?”  
  
“Yeah, get outta here,” Worth replied, waving them off and setting his attention back to Conrad, who'd put on another scowl and asked shrilly, “ _Bones?_ What does he need _bones_ for?”  
  
They left the run-down building that Worth's little office was nestled in and stepped back out into the flickering lights of the run-down streets surrounding it. This city that he'd found himself in was actually one of his favorites, compared to places he'd lived before. It was sort of gross, yeah, but no more or less than you'd expect of a place like this, litter and graffiti strewn here and there like any teenager's room. But it wasn't careless, it was casual. It didn't reek of desperation and despair, but smelled more of the pride you have in the meager mess you've managed to accumulate when you've been down-and-out for too long, although with a faint odor of urine overlaying it, sure. And where most cities didn't seem to give a damn about you, this one had just the right amount of nosiness, just enough to make you feel like someone would notice if you'd disappeared. It wasn't surprising that this was the city Worth had ended up in, and Lamont and apparently Conrad too. That was probably why _he'd_ stayed so long.  
  
He glanced over his shoulder and found ...erhhh, _the man_ (he was still working on a name or a title or something) walking there with his hands in his pockets (had they left his pockets since they 'met'?) in what Hanna had always thought of as the body-guard position-- within arm's reach, at his elbow, on whichever side was nearest the street. He'd done it on their way _to_ Worth's as well, switching sides whenever they crossed to the other side of the road. Funny he should still remember something like that, when he'd forgotten his entire identity.  
  
Actually, Hanna wasn't sure if that was normal. This whole situation was sort of a first for him. The zombie of an old friend spontaneously visiting him, obviously, yeah, but this was different than anything he'd done when he was an active necromancer. First of all, the amnesia, and really that was all he could think to call it, because it wasn't like the forced suppression of spirit he'd seen before-- those undead were just shambling corpses, couldn't even walk straight half the time. (Why anyone even used them like that was beyond Hanna; it was seriously inefficient.) And then the man's age. His dead-age. Most of the undead he'd met were less than a year old. Or, er, a year dead. After that, the standard procedure was to just raise the ghost instead (probably because nobody wanted to deal with decay any more than they had to, even mages who reveled in death). Third-- the fact that he'd known him. It wasn't... it wasn't as if Hanna had never raised anyone he'd known before... but with all three of those factors combined, it made for an unprecedented set of circumstances. So maybe it was normal for his friend to have retained his personality, it was hard to say.  
  
It was a nice, mild night, the sort that really lent itself to strolling, but Hanna was glad when they got home, because he was suddenly quite tired. It hadn't been a longer night than most others in which he had a case, but it was certainly more exhausting. He supposed emotional involvement could do that. Typically, sleep was pretty low on his hierarchy of needs (really, 1. breathing, 2. not bleeding out, and 3. not being possessed by demons were his only true priorities), but it was still as useful to him as to any other human in retaining a certain amount of mental acuity and pleasantness.  
  
“So, make yourself at home,” he said, as his tall friend followed him inside and was polite enough to close the door gently behind them. “I've got to do some...” _'human things',_ his tired brain almost said, managing to actually put out of his mouth, “sleeping.”  
  
The zombie nodded. “Good night,” he said, as easy-going as ever.  
  
“Good night,” Hanna replied, leaving the man to his own devices, whatever those might be, and rounding the corner to his bedroom, which was really hardly more than a mattress-room but would do the job. The mattress was probably not quite as old as him, and its springs creaked mightily under his scant weight when he fell upon it, but it was better than the floor, and vaguely better than the couch, and happened to be where all his mismatched blankets were at the time, so he cocooned himself in them, tucked his head into his pillow, and fell almost immediately to sleep.  
  
xXxXx


	2. Chapter 2

With a name like “Cross”, he could expect only to be the post upon which a martyr was hung, the ward around a righteous neck, a road where two paths met then carried on their separate ways. Perhaps. But he didn't care for destiny. Death was supposed to be destiny, wasn't it? Destiny meant little to him. Fate was just one of those words used by people who lacked control. He was not those people. He had learned better.  
  
Far from the town where he'd been raised, and far from the church that had almost begun to feel like home, he found himself in a city. It was a wonderful place, full of life and movement, mystery and opportunity. And full of death, far more so than the little town, more than the church even with its tombs and cemeteries. Death in the country was segregated from its counterpart, kept in check by the fear of the living. Here, death lay in puddles by the roadside, splashed across the stonework in dark alleys, hung like a mist in the air. It sat on peoples' nightstands, waiting for its time. It was not pushed away by the people of the city, who were too accustomed to it to pay it much mind.  
  
His first job here in the city of death was as a butcher's assistant. It was unglamorous, but it paid enough for a bed, and kept him fed on scraps of meat most would have thrown to the dogs, back in the country. Better than that, it let him build up a stock of blood and bones and skins, with which he created cheap death-ward amulets in his spare time. These he sold to the desperate he met in gutters at dusk, who were often all too happy to trade what little they'd begged throughout the day for them. He was confident in his craftsmanship, and the wards seemed effective; there were more and more beggars as the months wore on, and vaguely fewer bodies laying fresh by the roadside, although either could have been attributed to the measures people were willing to take as times got rougher.  
  
When the icy wind of his first winter began to freeze the city to its bones, one of his gutter-dwelling clients told him that the priest of the local church had asked after him, as the cold air rushed disease even through the cracks in the thick cathedral doors. Apparently God was not fast enough in answering prayers to keep their flock of worshipers safe from the wintery death, and their leader turned in desperation to the mysterious man whose praises were sung by the destitute. He seemed surprised to find, instead of a shadowy figure wrapped in a cloak of darkness, a young man small of stature and bright of color, whose eyes were only the slightest bit darkened.  
  
“I have heard the poor extolling the charms you provide to them,” the priest said, hands clasped before him. “How old are you, my son?”  
  
“Sixteen,” he replied, a mixture of prideful and modest.  
  
The priest was not surprised by this, having seen him, but he appeared concerned. “These talismans seem effective, though they are morbid in their makeup. Where does one so young as yourself learn to make such a thing?”  
  
“The priest from my hometown taught me,” he said. The priest had taught him many things both sanctioned and secret, but he did not have to share _all_ that he had learned.  
  
This priest seemed relieved to hear a man of God had been the cause of these amulets, and he smiled, though it was likely he still held reservations deep in his heart, as a holy man _ought_ , as a holy man should recognize the influence of black magic. But people were dying, so he gladly took the offered charms and ignored any ill feelings he might have about them.   
  
“May I ask your name, child?”  
  
“...Hanna,” the young amulet-maker told the priest.  
  
“Grace of God,” the priest commented, nodding in approval. “A good name. I pray that it continues to suit you.”  
  
Hanna nodded in acceptance of the priest's faint blessing, though neither gracefulness nor Godliness were of much concern to him these days. “Thank you for your patronage, Father,” he said before he took his leave.  
  
Once he could rely on periodic payments from the church, Hanna traded hours at the butcher for time to scavenge a greater rarity of ingredients, less commonplace pieces he could use to create more specified amulets, for which there was an increasing desire from the city's elite. It seemed one of the rich had come upon a death-ward of his and been impressed, for he was soon plied with more requests than he could handle of both charms he was capable of creating, and wishful magics he was fairly certain no living creature on this earth could actually produce. As expected, the regular citizens feared death and wished for miracles, but had no knowledge of how magic worked.  
  
He received many requests from many different sources in the months following his meeting the priest. Some went through the church; how ever the priest may have felt about Hanna's use of the magical arts, he delivered the messages reliably. Some were brought by the poor folks he still often helped, couriering the missives for the rich masters of servant friends who had spread the word. Still others were handed him personally by middle-upper-class men and women who were savvy enough to find him and had an abundance of time and money, and a lack of other things with which to occupy themselves.  
  
The call for amulets he answered swiftly. Creation of the death-wards was like child's play to him by now, having made hundreds of the blood-and-bone charms he had begun with, and dozens of the less-effective yet more expensive sort often asked for by rich folks who turned their noses up at pig sinew. He started to try other types of talismans, at the behest of clients with more specific needs and his own desire for challenge. A charm that very quickly became popular was that which delayed the onset of decay in organic materials, although it was expensive to produce and lasted only a day or two, which made it quite specific to nobles gifting food or flowers to their paramours. Another was to kill pests which ventured into the talisman's protective zone, which was more Hanna's forte, and more useful to the lower-class families that he honestly preferred working for. He found the elite an annoyance to deal with.  
  
The rich did, however, give him some of his more interesting requests that first year, petitions for tasks that pushed the boundaries of what he was comfortable with, back into the things he'd learned from his master but never had the occasion to further experiment with due to sheer impracticality. The first one, Hanna would never decide if the client was the usual simpleton who expected magic could do anything, or was a rare sort who actually knew what a practiced necromancer was capable of; they asked that he find out the location of their recently-departed grandmother's pearl necklace, which had apparently not been buried with her, as nobody in the family knew what had happened to it.  
  
The client hadn't specifically asked that he raise their grandmother from her earthly grave and ask what had become of the necklace, but it occurred to Hanna that it was entirely possible and, in fact, the only way he could think to accomplish such a thing. Though he had not done so for over a year, and not without the supervision of his master, Hanna had raised the dead before, so he decided to do so once more.  
  
The graveyard in which the client's grandmother was buried was not guarded, nor was it fenced in, and the last of the mourners left well before dark in order to avoid the night air, so at twilight Hanna took the shovel he'd bought from a local stable-hand specifically for this task and set to work digging. Some hours later, the fancy coffin was unearthed. Hanna opened the heavy lid and found an old woman so freshly dead that the only real signs of her lack of life were the faintest odor of decay and her stillness of body and breath. He did not remove her from the coffin, but rather set to drawing the circle wide around her entire grave. The set-up of this ritual took longer than the time necessary to cobble together several death-wards but, if successful, would pay ten times the price. If unsuccessful, he hoped not to be arrested for grave-robbery.  
  
When the circle was complete, and the needed items laid out within and without the lines, Hanna knelt on the other side of the circle near the woman's chest, let his hands just inside to hover over her heart in what looked not quite like a prayer, and said what was, if memory served him, the incantation to call back the spirit temporarily.  
  
There was nothing dramatic about the effect. The woman's eyes and wrinkled fingers began to twitch. She opened her mouth and coughed, trying to force air into lungs that did not need it. Hanna gave her a moment to collect herself before reaching down for her cold hand and holding it between his own in a bid to calm and comfort her.  
  
She turned her neck stiffly and opened her eyes at him, and scowled heavily, a look that was not out of place on such a well-kept matronly old woman. “Boy, what are you doing?” she asked, weakly yanking her wrinkled hand from his grasp. “Why have you brought us out here into the cold? We'll catch our deaths in this chill!”  
  
Hanna thought it best not to remind her that she was already dead, as she seemed to have forgotten. “I need to know what became of your pearl necklace,” he told her.  
  
“Why? I should tell you so that you can steal it from me and pawn it to some commoner on the street? You're daft.”  
  
Instantly, Hanna regretted his lack of foresight in the matter of a corpse's willingness to cooperate. There'd been another spell his master had used to ensure straightforward answers from the reawakened, and it needed to have been performed simultaneously, so it was of little use to him now, even if he could recall the incantation or ingredients.  
  
“I should have you arrested for bothering an old lady on her death-bed,” the woman said shrilly. “I'm quite ill, I'll have you know, and you've brought me out here to the middle of nowhere to pester me about my jewels!”  
  
Hanna grimaced at the woman's volume, hoping nobody came to investigate the argument happening at the cemetery. “Your grandchildren are fighting over who the pearl necklace belongs to,” he lied quickly. “Tell me where it is, and I'll give it to whoever you want to have it.”  
  
The woman looked thoroughly annoyed. “Well it doesn't belong to any of them! If I wanted them to have it, I'd have given it to them! Now take me back home this instant, young man, or else I shall yell for the police.”  
  
He didn't doubt her in the slightest, and he didn't doubt that being found here by the police would get him in more trouble than a pearl necklace was worth, so he got up and scratched out the dirt circle without another word to her. He checked briefly that her spirit had fled her body with the breaking of the circle, then closed the lid with a dull thunk and set about returning the loose earth to its final resting place around the coffin.  
  
He sent a response to the old woman's greedy grandchild the next day apologizing that unfortunately what they asked was not possible, then went out and bought a leather-bound journal to keep his notes in.  
  
After that, Hanna decided he needed more practice. He took on jobs that required a greater variety of ways to raise and deal with the dead. The pearl-necklace family was unfortunately a lost opportunity, but he managed several similar requests soon after with few problems, employing various other spells as safeguards during the raising. Before long, the raising rituals were less his problem than the time and effort it took to unearth the corpses, so he took to hiring more able-bodied beggars to help with the physical parts of the process, and practiced the ritual for calling up only the spirits when the weather was too inclement to be out in, or the body was too rotted to speak the answers he was looking for, or he was not in the mood to spend inordinate amounts of time in a graveyard.  
  
Answers were not all that his living clients wished from the dead. At one point, a very rich politician called upon his skills to terrorize an opponent, discrediting the other official's otherwise well-received messages by plaguing the man with visions of nightmares brought on by spirits sent to invade his sleep. His screams echoed throughout the city for several nights preceding the elections, and word quickly spread that he had lost his mind, ensuring Hanna's client an easy victory. The man paid him handsomely and quietly for his mysterious work, the process of which Hanna never explained to anyone who did not already know. The politician had only asked he throw his opponent's mind in disarray; it was likely neither he nor most of Hanna's other clients ever realized that magic or spirits were pieces and players in his game, and he was happy to let them think his abilities were mere trickery. He had no desire to land himself in the gallows by being too open with his employers.  
  
Some, of course, knew the truth. Most of those who had figured out where Hanna's real skills lay were not the sort to tell. For the most part, it was the poor and the strange who understood, those who recognized death when it approached them. The rich were too protected, and too far in denial of death's presence to entertain the thought that it was an element that could be manipulated like fire, or water, or any other. So, in general, he continued to sell to them his charms and answers and trickery, and let them believe whatever they liked about them.  
  
Though there were several among his well-paying customers who apparently had reason to believe he was capable of more than sleight-of-hand, some who knew he was able to look beyond the veil of death, and more willing than the church to disrupt what it would call the natural order of things.  
  
One distraught man had returned home from a long business trip to find his wife had succumbed to disease while he had been away. He gave Hanna nearly all he had earned on his journey for a chance to say goodbye. It was an exorbitant amount of money for a young man who had grown up in the country, regardless of how relatively successful he'd been since relocating to the city, but he would admit later that he would have helped this man for even just a paltry sum. The need to say a final farewell was something he understood, something about which he felt strongly enough to temporarily ignore his usual rule of keeping his methods secret from his clients.  
  
He asked the man to bring something of his wife's, something that held significance to her. He came with an oval-shaped locket that held a tiny painting of the two of them. “I should have buried it with her,” he said, staring down at it sadly. “But I could not bring myself to part with this too.”  
  
The two of them set off to the cemetery just before nightfall, carrying shovels beneath their long coats. Aside from his jacket, the husband was not dressed for hard labor in the chill of the night, and Hanna was mildly concerned for his health, but did not wonder why he was dressed so.  
  
When the coffin was nearly unearthed, Hanna left his client to finish digging and began tracing his circle in the dirt, the patterns more intricate than any before. He left off the cooperation spell, but paid special attention to the degree of mobility, and added in a light physical glamor. The man was in enough despair without having to see the first stages of rot in his wife's fair skin as he said his goodbyes.  
  
“Put on the locket, then open the casket lid,” Hanna instructed the man, holding out his hands above the chest of the coffin. He muttered the incantation in time with the opening, and by the time the man had rushed back to look inside, the woman was awake.  
  
“Jeremy?” she asked, seeming a little dazed.  
  
“Elizabeth, my love.” The words left the man's mouth more breath than voice.  
  
“You're here!” the wife exclaimed softly. “But why? What of your trip?”  
  
“I have returned,” he said, and the sadness that had left his eyes when he saw his wife's smile returned. “But too late, it seems.”  
  
Hanna left them then, wandering several headstones away to give them some privacy. He needn't be present for the dead woman to remain animate, as long as she stayed within the uninterrupted circle. The sun would not rise for many an hour, and the air was cold, but none present would mind. He let them be for as long as he dared before he had to send the wife's spirit away again and return her body to the ground. Afterward, the man paid him the promised amount, and gave him a more sincere thanks than Hanna had ever heard from a client, let along a grieving one.  
  
“I owe you so much more than I can rightly express,” he told Hanna, not bothering to wipe the tears from where they sat in heavy puddles in his eyes. “Before I saw her, I was not sure. But now I think I can go on living.”  
  
Unfortunately, not all bereaved clients found themselves at such peace when the night was coming to a close. Another evening, another dug-up grave of a deceased loved one. The client was an affluent young woman who pined endlessly for her fiance, who had been stabbed to death in a dark alley the month before their wedding. She was beside herself with grief, but her eyes lit up when she saw her betrothed, stab wounds concealed by both the efforts of the undertaker and the glamor Hanna had added to the raising ritual. He'd left the two to speak in private, but when he came back some hours later, the woman's expression had become one of steely determination.  
  
“Mr. Cross, I simply cannot lose him again,” she said, gripping tight to her beloved's hand as he sat up in his grave, expression much like hers. “Surely there must be some way to bring him back for good. Please!”  
  
Hanna grimaced. While technically possible, it was not something he was going to risk, not even were she to offer him all the money in the city. “I'm sorry,” he told her. “There is no way.”  
  
However, the girl did not want to hear this, and she quickly became inconsolable, and her betrothed became rageful. The emotional bond between them, strengthened by the trinket Hanna always told his clients to bring, was too powerful and was causing the undead man to turn violent in his wild need to protect his loved one. Hanna had not considered this as a potential problem, though it seemed an obvious risk, after the fact. People were predictable, and when it came to letting go of something or someone before they felt ready, the young magic-user knew very surely that it sometimes took solid intervention.  
  
At this point, he was not especially concerned for the girl's well-being, as she had proved herself quite a nuisance, and he was not concerned for his own physical safety, but he did worry that the woman's screaming would draw attention. The corpse of the client's fiance was clawing madly at the dirt now, dragging himself out of his grave and in the direction of Hanna, who he saw as the cause of his beloved's distress. Hanna simply stepped several yards out of range of the corpse's flailing limbs, ignoring him, as he knew it was not the dead man who was a threat.  
  
The woman was sobbing loudly, mixed with inelegant and unintelligible pleas to either her loved one or Hanna, he was not sure which. He needed a moment to think, to recall a spell he'd had very little use for any time within recent memory. The dead man presently clawed right through the carved dirt circle, disrupting the magic that held his spirit to his body. For a moment, Hanna's client stopped and stared at the once-again lifeless corpse in a stunned silence, before her despair returned with fervor now directed entirely at the young man she seemed to blame for his second death. However, in the short moment of quiet, Hanna had recalled the spell he now silently vowed to keep practiced and at hand, and threw a handful of dust in the woman's direction, reciting the incantation as she coughed.  
  
With those words, she dropped to the ground in a sudden death-like sleep. Hanna took a deep breath and let it out in a relieved sigh. The sun would be returning soon, so he worked as quickly as possible to return the man to his coffin and pack the dirt around it. He laid the woman on top of the grave, head pillowed on her arms as if she had fallen asleep crying, and headed home.  
  
A week later, the woman sent a request for his assistance in saying a last goodbye to her beloved fiance, having forgotten the entire event, but the necromancer declined, responding with unusual vigor that sometimes one simply needed to let go.  
  
From then on, he required that clients pay the entire agreed-upon amount before they began, and kept his dust pouch full and on his person at all times.  
  
Luckily, not all cases were nearly as personal. He preferred when the client had a vested interest in the outcome but was not likely to fly off the handle if things went badly. A majority of rich folks were reasonable that way, at least when the case did not involve forlorn lovers, and most poor folks were so desperate and hopeless that they never seemed to expect things to go right in the first place, so it was really only the middle class which he was wary of working for. Of course, the middle class were most of the people Hanna was likely to see on the street, and most of the people who were even seen by society, forget that more than half the people in the city were less than poor, by his reckoning. The shop owners were of the middle class, as were the clergy and the police force, all fairly well-off sorts who tended to be very uptight not only about their money, but also about words like “magic”. It was impossible not to work with these sorts of people, but he found he had to be quite careful how much he said to them, wording his descriptions such that caused his methods to seem mundane and worldly.  
  
Thus, he was hesitant to answer his door when he heard a knock upon it one morning, and not only because he had been attempting sleep after a long night. Both his walls and door were thinner than he would like, but still the voice on the other side was fairly muffled, the sound of it caught up between the noises of people rushing hither and thither through their morning routines, and Hanna could just make out that the man had declared himself “Detective” something.  
  
“Hanna Cross?” the man called from the other side, knocking in a strong, professional manner.  
  
It was not that police made him quite nervous, just that he was familiar with the sensationalism of common people, their tendency to be spooked easily. He quickly cast his mind about any recent clients who had not been entirely pleased by his work and who might have decided to complain to the authorities of the vile magic user whom they most certainly would not admit to working with. He couldn't recall any, but still he was in no mood to answer the door for an officer.  
  
“Does Hanna Cross live at this location?” the detective called.  
  
A moment or two passed in which Hanna debated pretending not to be home, but the man continued to knock insistently.  
  
“Hanna? Hanna. Someone's at the door for you.”  
  
What? Of course someone was at the door. _He_ was at the door.   
  
“Hanna. Hanna, are you okay?”  
  
Groaning, because the door was all the way over there and he was trying to sleep and he didn't feel like dealing with people right now but this guy would just not shut up, Hanna got out of bed and went to the door. He unlatched the heavy lock and peeked through the small opening. “Can I help you?”  
  
“There's a girl here to see you,” the man said, looking a bit confused. “She says her name is Toni. I think she wants to hire you.”


	3. Chapter 3

“What?” Hanna blinked, a chilly jolt running through him, then blinked again heavily. He was still laying on his mattress with the thin sheets bunched up around his waist, staring up at the concerned face of his zombie companion.  
  
“Oh, Aleksey, hey.”  
  
“Aleksey?”  
  
“Just... something I'm trying out,” he said, sort of wondering at it himself. “Just gimme a sec, I'll be out in a minute. Geez, what time is it anyway?”  
  
“Late morning sometime,” Aleksey guessed, and Hanna remembered that there were no clocks in the house.  
  
“Huh.” That meant he'd probably gotten almost a standard full-night's sleep, which was far more than he usually ended up with. It'd felt like a lot longer than eight hours, though. Felt like years. “Thanks,” he said, pulling himself out of bed and glancing around for his glasses (which he didn't remember taking off, of course) and maybe some sort of clean-ish clothes.  
  
The zombie nodded and removed himself from the room. Hanna could hear the soft rumble of his voice at the door to the apartment, softer than he somehow felt it should be. It wasn't wrong or anything, it just lacked a certain... conviction. Though that was sort of to be expected-- the dead did tend to be kind of lethargic when not evoked to fits of magic-induced rage.  
  
Hanna scavenged quickly, not giving his mind the time to sort through what he'd been dreaming. There was a customer to tend to! It was strange, that he'd have someone show up at his door two days in a row (actually, twice in the same 24-hour period), when normally he found himself lacking employment for sometimes weeks at a time. Better not to look a gift-horse in the mouth, though, he thought.  
  
When he rounded the corner of his room (which didn't have a door, for some reason; only the bathroom was truly separate from the rest of the apartment, and that door didn't even lock), he found his undead friend standing several feet from a pretty young woman, observing her quietly as she leaned against the wall by the door and tapped her fingers together impatiently, but not in a way that suggested irritation. She didn't wait for introductions once she noticed Hanna approaching her.  
  
“I'm so sorry to bother you this early,” she said. (And Hanna found himself approving; so many people didn't have a proper concept of what was considered early, even among the supernatural community. Naturey sorts like witches and sprites were notorious for being morning-oriented and ignoring that some people literally couldn't do daylight. Of course, Hanna did not have those specific anti-sun limitations, but he dealt often enough with the metaphorical skeleton crew that he tended towards night living himself, at least these days.) “I've been up all night, and I really need your help.”  
  
“Uh, okay, sure. What can I do for you?”  
  
The girl, Toni?, took a deep, steadying breath. “It's my brother. I need your help finding him.”  
  
Typically, finding regular ol' missing persons was not Hanna's greatest talent, but he sensed there was more to the story, so he nodded for her to go on.  
  
“We're werewolves. We were out last night and we got into a fight with a gang of vampires. I don't know how much you know about werewolves and vampires?”  
  
She paused, and Hanna nodded. “A little.”  
  
“We don't get along very well. I think they were looking for a fight, too,” she added, “because they had wolfs-bane on them.”  
  
Hanna had never gotten very involved in the werewolf versus vampire feud, because why alienate an entire sub-group of potential customers, but he'd been around long enough to see at least recent incarnations of it develop seemingly over night and for no reason that he could understand. He didn't know how violent it got, but if it was as bad as Toni seemed to be implying, it looked like the vampires were winning; the werewolf population in the general area had dropped considerably in the past few decades. Maybe they were just moving on to greener pastures, but it was hard for him to say.  
  
“So what happened to your brother?” he asked, not quite making the connection between a scuffle with vampires which Toni at least had obviously survived, and a missing sibling. Maybe they kidnapped him?  
  
“One of his wounds was pretty deep, and I think the wolfs-bane got into his system,” she explained, looking understandably stressed but holding it together very well. “He turned crazed and ran off, and I can't track him down because my amulet's cracked. If the wolfs-bane wears off, he might come home on his own, but if it doesn't then I _have_ to find him before nightfall. You can help me, can't you, Mr. Cross?”  
  
He'd never had any siblings, not even anybody who was _like_ a sibling, but Hanna had a soft spot for families trying to protect each other. He always had, even back in the dark days. “Yeah, I'm sure we can find him!” he said, and he _was_ pretty sure, he wasn't just trying to sound reassuring. Actually, he'd had a case a lot like this before. Not something he had time to reminisce about now, but it had gone not-horribly, so it was a fairly strong testimony to his ability to help this girl. “Let me get a couple things and we can go.”  
  
Toni sighed heavily, relief radiating off of her like a heat wave. “Thank you so much, Mr. Cross. This means the world to me! I don't have a lot of money, but I will find some way to pay you!”  
  
“Call me Hanna,” he responded casually as he rummaged through his less-than-fully-stocked cabinets for spell ingredients. He didn't address the matter of payment any further. Sure, he'd love some extra cash, but it wasn't a big deal, especially when there was someone missing and potentially in danger. Back when he was first starting out, he would've asked for at least half up-front for a case like this, ...but he guessed he'd mellowed out a little since then.  
  
Once he'd found all the necessary elements (and a few that probably weren't necessary, but hey, it'd been a long time since he'd done this particular spell; better to be _over-_ prepared, right?), he tossed them into a plastic grocery bag and jogged the five steps back to Toni and his friend at the door. “All set. Let's head to where you saw him last.”  
  
He turned and looked up to address Aleksey (hmm, no, he didn't think that was really working), but before he could suggest anything along the lines of staying here where it was relatively safe or something of the sort, the man gave him a very no-nonsense look and said, “I'm coming with you.” And Hanna wanted to argue, because... danger!... and stuff!... but no, he really didn't want to argue at all. God, he _wanted_ Caesar to come along, quite badly. So he just nodded, and led the way, letting the zombie close the door behind them.  
  
Toni took the lead once they were out on the street, guiding them closer to the middle-class neighborhoods Hanna didn't have a whole lot of business in usually. The girl looked a little tense, as you might expect of someone who'd been attacked in the area probably less than twelve hours ago, but Hanna wasn't concerned about the potential reappearance of vampires or anything. He _was_ the littlest bit wary of his companion being stared at too long by any civilians; they might not immediately notice his skin color which, though green, wasn't vibrant enough that it couldn't be mistaken for a natural living skin tone at a glance, but that shirt sure was attention grabbing. Luckily it wasn't early enough to still be dark out, or Hanna would have to worry about the man's glowing orange eyes too.  
  
He must have been staring, because Caesar tilted his head slightly and asked, “Something wrong?”  
  
“Oh, uh, no,” Hanna said. “Sorry. I was just admiring your shirt. I like how it matches your shoes. ...And your eyes.”  
  
“Does it?” he asked. “I haven't really looked at them.”  
  
Hanna was reminded again that Caesar was only a day old (or a day revived, anyway), little enough of a time to have reasonably avoided seeing himself in a mirror or reflection. Even though neither Hanna nor Worth had any mirrors or shiny ultra-modern furniture in their main living spaces, they had passed a few shops and office buildings with windows not so grimy as to be unable to see yourself in them, so most people would think he'd have noticed his reflection. Most people, though, hadn't lived back in a century when the most common reflections were just distorted glimpses from muddy puddles, and you usually didn't even bother to think about what you looked like (at least if you were a commoner). Probably, the zombie felt no instinct or desire to check out his appearance.  
  
“Yeah, they're kinda orange,” Hanna told him. “I guess that means you haven't seen those little white patches in your hair either?” The tufts of hair just above his ears looked almost like little wings. Hanna had noticed them the previous night, same as he'd noticed most of the other details about his companion, but he'd been under sort of a lot of stress at the time, so he hadn't given himself the chance to really look at them or think about them. They were quite, well, _cute,_ like the silly patterns that you sometimes saw on animals which made you want to pet them at least twice as much for no really-logical reason. He certainly hadn't had them before-- Caesar was too young for his dark black hair to be going more than maybe just the littlest bit grey, let alone white at all. And the hair there, around his temples, had not been nearly so fluffy, though Hanna recalled he thought it had been soft (no more so than the rest of his hair, though; just regular soft).  
  
These looked soft too and, well, whaddya know? --they were. He was a little surprised at himself to find that he'd reached up to run his fingers through the tufts, though not really surprised at their softness. God, it was like angel fur.  
  
In order to put his hands in his friend's hair, Hanna had had to start walking backwards, as they were still following a few feet behind Toni, and in hindsight, that was not a particularly good idea. A talented magic-user, Hanna _was_ ; a very coordinated person, Hanna was _not_ . And though they were in a more affluent part of town, whose sidewalks suffered considerably less neglect, his heel still caught on a slightly uneven slab of concrete, and he found himself going down.  
  
All of this happened very quickly. Between the moment in which Caesar had professed not to know the color of his own eyes and the moment in which Hanna found he had been quite smoothly caught under the arms by the zombie's deft hands and then set firmly right again next to him on the sidewalk, they'd only walked about ten yards. Which was probably why Hanna didn't have time to be properly embarrassed. He didn't have time for it afterward either, because as he was about to hang his head in acute horror and berate himself quietly for acting so freaking familiar with _his client_ ( _'he doesn't remember you! Don't be a creep. You wouldn't go up and_ pet _a random person on the street!')_ , his other client stopped and turned around.  
  
“The fight was back there,” Toni said, pointing to the lot behind the bar they were standing in front of. “I followed his trail about a mile away, but I lost his scent. Should I take you there?”  
  
“No, this is good,” Hanna told her, forgetting about his previous train of thought, for the time being. “Uh, if we can find exactly where he was when he went... crazed, that'd be best.”  
  
She lead them to where she thought he'd been when the wolfs-bane got into him, and Hanna knelt down on the asphalt to set up his spell circle. “I don't actually have to know for the ritual, but what's his name? I just feel like it's weird scrying for someone without knowing their name.”  
  
“Brandon,” she said. “Brandon Ipres. And I'm Toni, by the way. Sorry I didn't properly introduce myself earlier.”  
  
“No big deal,” Hanna said. “Things have been stressful for you, it's cool.” He continued to set objects and ingredients around a shallow bowl, nudging them into place. Then he stopped for a second, because something Toni said had rung a bell. “Ipres, huh? I've worked with that clan before. Not that I don't appreciate the business, but why didn't you get one of your pack-mates to help you find him?”  
  
Toni frowned, eyebrows drawing down toward her vibrant blue eyeshadow, which was a little smudged. “We're the last of our clan in this area. If you knew any other Ipres' it must've been years ago or in another state.”  
  
It certainly had been a while ago, more than long enough not to bother bringing it up right now. “Well I'm here to help, anyway,” he said, because apologizing would just slow things down and Toni had probably heard 'sorry for your loss' so many times she was sick of it, if she was anything like most other people who'd lost family members. The best he could do for her now was find the one she had left.  
  
Hanna pulled a bottle of water out from his plastic bag and poured it into the dish. Toni stood behind him, leaning over his shoulder to watch as he said a quiet incantation which caused the water to swirl like a gentle whirlpool. It became reflective and through the swirling they could see a series of broken images, among them a few sleeping pale men and women Hanna assumed were the vampires from last night, and a flash of Toni herself as she leaned there behind him. In a moment, the picture nearly settled on a young man lying unconscious but hopefully alive in what appeared to be a forest.  
  
“That's him! Oh thank god.” The werewolf girl scrubbed both hands over her face and took a deep breath. “Now how do we find him?”  
  
“That's the next part,” Hanna said, as he carefully poured the water back into the plastic bottle, after having scrawled a few runes on it with a marker. “Hold this,” he then said, handing it to Toni, who cradled it as if it were very fragile. She held it up to her face and watched as the silvery image of her brother still swirled around. Meanwhile, Hanna rummaged through his bag for a piece of plain string, which he then dropped in the water. The length of it was caught in the middle of the little whirlpool, but the end that floated on the top of the water spun around like the hands of a clock, eventually coming to rest with the tip pointing back toward the street.  
  
“Now we follow it,” Hanna said brightly. “It should lead us right to him.”  
  
So they followed. Toni held on to the bottle, peeking down at the string every few seconds, and Hanna and his friend followed behind her. From here on out, it was an easy case... as long as Brandon wasn't severely injured or suffering badly from the poison, because Hanna knew next to nothing about healing, and really hadn't studied up on wolfs-bane as much as he admitted he probably should have. One would _think_ that after being nearly mauled to death by a wolfs-bane-crazed 'were', he'd have taken some sort of precautions for any potential next times, but he'd still been fairly reckless and, okay, yes, overconfident back then. If he'd had any issues with wolves since he'd gained a bit of self-preservation, he almost certainly would have tried to think of something. Today probably wouldn't be a problem, though.  
  
They walked for some time, slowly so as not to jostle the string or spill the water. (Actually, the string was not really jostle-able, since it was magicked in its guiding position, but Toni didn't know that.) It was a surprisingly nice day, though perhaps only 'surprising' because Hanna subconsciously kept expecting to be back in the city from his memory-dream, where nice days really were surprising. With such gentle weather, and his self-assurance that things (at least in this case) were going well, he found himself finally able to think clearly and without panicking. Really, he hadn't handled things very well last night, though he hoped it wasn't too obvious how out of his comfort zone he'd been. Well, to Caesar anyway-- he was pretty sure Worth could tell, and he didn't especially care, because he was fairly certain he could trust the man to keep his secret.  
  
The zombie though... Yeah, the guy had always been pretty darn perceptive back in the day, and given how his general speech patterns and gait and some of his little habits had seemed to pull through in his resurrection even if his memory didn't, Hanna guessed his keen eye and ability to grasp the nuances of most given situations had probably survived as well. And yet, he was still here. He'd been determined to come along today, and Hanna didn't think it was because the man was worried he was gonna run away and not finish solving his case or anything. At very least it was because he liked to be involved in things, especially solvable problems and investigations, and at most... well, _most_ could really go a long way, but on the upper end of the scale it was perhaps because he still inexplicably felt the need to protect Hanna. Which was dumb, because Hanna did not need protecting and he never had, as he had told him many times! ...But he still liked it when Caesar tagged along. (No, he was done with 'Caesar'. Come to think of it, _boy_ was he done with Caesar! He should never have picked that one to begin with, ugh, terrible.)  
  
Maybe he _knew?_ ...No, no, he didn't know. Temujin wasn't the kind of guy who would keep a big secret like that just to see how someone else reacted. If he knew anything about the current situation, he would have mentioned it, and he hadn't done so, ergo he knew nothing. ...Probably. He did seem to have a habit of _looking_ at Hanna, though, _curiously,_ like he was studying him, like he knew there was something about the paranormal investigator that he should be able to understand but wasn't quite getting. Actually... Hanna looked back over his shoulder, and the guy was staring at him even now. As soon as he noticed he'd been caught watching, he slowly let his eyes drift off in a different direction.  
  
_'Smooth,'_ Hanna thought, laughing under his breath. ...God, he'd missed this.  
  
Well, anyway, Temujin was still hanging around, so either Hanna was doing something right or, more likely, being dead for a hundred years just wasn't enough to erase the man the zombie had been when he was alive. He wondered if that meant his memory was also still there somewhere, and then wondered if he _wanted_ it to be there. Based on what little they'd interacted since yesterday, it did seem like the memories might still be around, buried maybe beneath the trauma of dying and coming back to life? He'd never seen that before, but it was a possibility, he supposed. And based on what he'd been telling himself in his internal monologue last night, Hanna did _not_ want his partner's memories to still be there, but he'd already admitted that he wasn't entirely in his right mind at the time. So maybe he did want them to come back. ...Well, no, not really. Some of them, yes, but not all of them. If only he could pick and choose. Bring back all the good times they'd had, all the life-threatening situations they'd laughed about afterward, leave behind the death and disagreements and promise breaking. Wouldn't that be nice. But even with magic, life was rarely ever that convenient.  
  
Hanna spent another few minutes idly fantasizing about how great life would be if, y'know, things went absolutely perfectly (Temujin would officially move in with him, and they'd pick back up on their hardcore investigating business, maybe they'd get a cat or something, and Hanna would never have to apologize because you can't apologize when there's _nothing wrong_ ), until Toni stopped abruptly and looked around.  
  
“He's here,” she said, breathing deeply. “I should have guessed.”  
  
They were on a beaten dirt path in a forest Hanna sometimes came to for ingredients. It was a popular place for runners and some other woodsy types, but for the most part not many people seemed to come here, which made it a lucky place for their crazed wolf to have come, because that meant they were far less likely to have to deal with any victims who got in his way. This became more-likely true as Toni started off the path, up a fairly steep hill which averagely-fit Hanna and the (at least previously) quite-fit zombie had a hard time climbing. Temujin made it up first and knelt down to lend Hanna a hand. Toni had already dropped the water bottle and ran on ahead. Luckily the magic in what little water remained was still active, so they followed the string through the dense trees and underbrush. Not a minute later, they found Toni in a very small clearing, gently holding her brother in her lap.  
  
“Is he okay?” Hanna asked, hurrying over.  
  
Toni nodded. “I think so, yeah. Just sleeping. And he's clean, too.” She held up his hand, showing that his nails and sleeve were as muddy as expected, but clear of blood.  
  
“Good,” Hanna said. “I'm not really a healer, so.” Now that he knew Brandon was in the clear, he took a moment to look around at where they'd ended up. It was a little mostly-flat space about the size of his living room, surrounded by the thick forest. It looked like someone had cleared it out on purpose, but he got the feeling it was like this naturally. Or at least supernaturally. A foot or two from where Toni was sitting, there were a few large polished stones in the ground, and Hanna recognized them as grave markers. There didn't seem to be anything engraved on them, but he was willing to bet Toni and her brother knew who it was they were placed there for.  
  
Still holding on to Brandon's hand, but satisfied that his life was not in danger (any more than it probably ever was, Hanna would guess; they were supernaturals, of course), Toni looked up at Hanna and noticed his interest in the stones. “Yeah, they're what you think,” she said. “This one closest to me is our mom. Then there's Dad, our uncle, and our grandparents. It's been a while since the last time, but he always used to come here when he was upset, so I guess I can't be surprised.”  
  
She said all this very calmly, and Hanna wondered how young they were when their parents passed away, but he didn't ask. “It's a nice place,” he said simply.  
  
“Yeah,” she said, distracted, gazing at the stones. Hanna had thought she might tell him more about her family, or maybe the significance of the clearing, but she stayed quiet, so he let her be for a few minutes. Instead he turned to Temujin, who was half turned away as if trying to afford Toni some privacy in this small forest room. Hanna came to stand by him, sticking his hands in his pockets to match.  
  
“Thanks for your help,” he said up to the man.  
  
“I didn't do anything,” the zombie replied, raising a skeptical eyebrow in the usual manner.  
  
Hanna shrugged. “You were moral support. That's still important.”  
  
A tiny smile quirked up in the corner of Temujin's lips. “Then you're welcome,” he said. “Do you usually do without?”  
  
“Moral support?” Hanna asked. “You mean do I usually work alone. Uh, yeah, most of the time. Worth helps me sometimes, but not like... out in the field. Nah, it's usually just me.” He looked up at the zombie, who was watching him quietly, politely, as ever. He wasn't asking for further explanations; heck, he'd just asked a simple question, but Hanna's treacherous mind and mouth didn't want to quit. “I used to have a partner way back in the day, but we ...parted ways, like lifetimes ago. So, yeah, it's just me, these days. It's kinda lonely, but you get used to it, right?”  
  
_'Understatements everywhere,'_ he thought, as he wondered why his mouth was running wild on subjects it ought to just shut up about.  
  
“I'm sorry,” the zombie said. His eyes were soft, lending the simple condolence a credibility it didn't have when most people said it.  
  
“Hey, no big deal,” Hanna said with a shrug. “You're here now.” He paused a split second, long enough for an alarm to go off in his head over the too-true phrasing in what had accidentally slipped out between his lips. 'You're here _now.'_ No no no no no, that was extremely wrong. “Hahaha, I mean, _you're_ here now.”  
  
Temujin didn't call him out on the awkward emphasis slip. “You don't mind my tagging along?”  
  
“No! No, not at all! Like I said, moral support. It's totally cool!”  
  
“If you say so,” Temujin replied, looking quite glad about it.  
  
Hanna nodded emphatically. “I do say so. A second pair of eyes can come in handy too.” He debated sticking his hand out for the zombie to shake like 'alright, partners then?', but while he debated, ~~Temujin~~ Maurice decided to do just that. He didn't _say_ anything, but it was clear they both knew they were on the same wavelength when he presented his right hand. Hanna gaped at it for a very very short moment, then quickly shook it, grip stronger even than his usual surprisingly intense one. (People were always a little shocked, given his stature, as if short people were supposed to have soft grips or something? For the record, the zombie's was the same as when he'd been alive, firm but gentle and apparently not as enthusiastic (or, in this case, desperate) as Hanna.)  
  
Although he didn't think “that was that” necessarily, because Maurice probably only meant to imply that he'd be happy to work together while they were waiting on his own case to be solved, Hanna felt a weight lifted from him. It wasn't the same as “sure, I'll stay with you forever!” but this little agreement or whatever they seemed to have just entered into made Hanna feel like at least he didn't have to worry as much about his friend leaving so suddenly. (Barring any tragedies, of course. There was always that to consider or, y'know, _not_ consider, lest it cause a person to spiral into an uncontrollable depression.) So, with that little bit of security provided to his current mental and emotional states, Hanna was sure he'd be able to focus better on the task at hand.  
  
He looked over his shoulder at Toni, who seemed to be murmuring at her still-sleeping brother. Well, he hadn't meant _this_ task, actually, but yes, he probably needed to help finish the case he was actually hired to do, before moving on to the other one. (After all, Toni had at least offered to pay Hanna, whether or not he actually accepted any money from her not being the issue, and the zombie had not mentioned anything of the sort which technically made him not a customer but a charity case ( _'like most of my clients,'_ he thought with something of a resigned sigh).) He made quick eye contact with Maurice and nodded his head back in the werewolves' direction. The zombie stayed a step behind, but followed Hanna as he headed over.  
  
“You need help getting him home?” he asked, keeping his voice soft, more out of respect for Toni than for Brandon's sleeping state, as Hanna didn't expect him just to wake up from a wolfs-bane trance as if he'd been taking a nap. It'd probably be hours or maybe another day before loud voices were enough to rouse him.  
  
“Oh, um, yeah,” she said, nodding gently, “that would be great.” She took another moment to softly stroke her brother's hair one last time before she set him down on the hard-packed dirt and stepped back, leaving Maurice room to step forward and scoop him up without any prompting whatsoever, seemingly knowing his role in this situation like he knew anything else he appeared to do on instinct. He didn't show any signs of strain, though Brandon was taller at least than Hanna and probably twice as muscular, and the magic user wondered if the usual rule of practically boundless zombie strength applied to this particular one. (The reason zombies were usually so strong was because they didn't have a consciousness or sense of self-preservation to hold them back. Maurice definitely was in possession of those traits (well, the self-preservation was questionable, but he had as much now as he ever did, as much as could be expected from a guardian type who always acted like his life was best spent throwing himself in front of danger to protect innocents), so if he still had access to vast amounts of power, that would be nothing short of awesome. Or scary, if you were on the other side. It was something to look into.)  
  
They made their way back down the hill much more carefully than they had on their way up, Toni leading the way again, but Hanna bringing up the rear this time. They kept to a smaller path in the woods as long as possible, instead of exiting back onto the main road where there were people who might think it strange to see a greenish man carrying a lifeless body, flanked by two unlikely bodyguards, and perhaps decide to call local law enforcement about it. That was the last thing they needed right now; daytime police officers weren't used to even close to this amount of weirdness, from Hanna's experience. (And actually, police weren't the 'last thing' they needed at the moment. Probably the last thing would be a spontaneous apocalypse, and before that maybe a sudden influx of vampires. Police were still pretty high on the list though.)  
  
It didn't take very long to get back to the Ipres' house, which was a cute little thing in a suburban neighborhood that was probably built in the 80's. By now, most of the residents of the area had gone off to work or school, so there weren't many people to do suspicious double-takes in their direction. Toni jogged ahead to get the door for them, then closed it behind them again once they were in, locking the nob, the deadbolt, and the reinforced chain in a swift, practiced motion.  
  
“Up the stairs and on the left at the end of the hallway,” she told the zombie, before dashing off to the kitchen. Hanna followed his partner up to the second floor and into (presumably) Brandon's room, where they set the young man down on the nicely made-up bed.  
  
The room was painted in shades of deep blue, and the walls were adorned with a mismatched variety of posters and memorabilia, much of which looked like they'd been there for years, relics of a 90's childhood. Hanna glanced back to Maurice and found he'd wandered off into the far corner of the room and was looking at a “Night of the Living Dead” poster with a sort of amused disbelief.  
  
Toni came in then, drawing their attention back to the bed. “Thanks,” she said shortly, as she set a few things on the bedside table then knelt down level with her sleeping brother. “He should be fine now. I'm just gonna treat the entry wound anyway. Better safe than sorry.”  
  
“Yeah, definitely,” Hanna responded. He would have offered to help with the process of patching him up, but Toni looked like she knew what she was doing, so he just stayed out of her way. Though he thought she was probably capable of multitasking, so he decided to bring up something else he remembered her mentioning that morning. “By the way, you said something about your, uh, your amulet being broken? Did you want help with that?”  
  
“What?” Toni stopped and looked up from where she was dabbing alcohol on her brother's wound. “Can you? You don't know how much that would mean to us. They've been broken for years.” She set down the cotton ball she'd been using and pulled her necklace off over her head.  
  
' _Years?'_ Hanna thought, remembering back to the werewolves he'd known before the amulets had become popular. _'Geez, that must have sucked.'_ He took the rectangular amulet when she handed it to him. “Yeah, I can fix this, sure. I'm actually pretty familiar with them. Or, I mean, I used to be, so if I can remember, if shouldn't be a problem.”  
  
The amulet was a clay or ceramic block about the size and shape of a mahjong tile, painted with a pretty design of a wolf, and strung on a thin piece of leather cord. It was still holding together, but there was a large crack right down the middle of it, and it didn't seem like it would be in one piece for much longer. It was really nice looking, much classier than the haphazardly slapped-together ones he'd made for a client in the past. Apparently a hundred years and a need to constantly wear the things was enough to inspire someone down the line to create a more refined design.  
  
“We don't strictly _need_ them,” Toni said as Hanna turned the tile over and looked at it from all different angles. “But it makes it a lot easier to control the transformations, even for born wolves. I've done without its full power for a couple of years now, but if you could put it right again, that would make things a lot easier.” She turned and fished around in the bedside table, coming back with a second one, which she also handed to Hanna. “Brandon's broke last year, but I wish he would have still worn it last night. They can still help a little, even when they're broken. He might have been able to withstand the poison.”  
  
Hanna nodded. He knew how they worked, quite well. They were just variations on the standard protection charms he'd made back in the day, just tailored to a werewolf's unique physiology and circumstances and linked to... no, actually, these weren't linked to anyone in particular. They weren't? He looked over the tiles again, wondering if he'd missed something, but no, the two amulets were almost identical, save for the brush strokes that showed they'd been hand-painted and the different patterns of cracks arcing through them like thin tendrils of lightning. There wasn't anything to differentiate between which was Toni's and which was Brandon's, nothing physical, and nothing in the faint magical auras around them.  
  
“Where'd you get these?” Hanna asked.  
  
“I don't know?” Toni looked like the question was bizarre to her. “We've had them as long as I can remember. Our parents gave them to us.”  
  
“So they might have belonged to someone else before?”  
  
Toni frowned. “Um, I guess so. Is that a problem?”  
  
Honestly, it was far less of a problem than a solution to a problem Toni likely didn't know existed. “No, it's just that they'd be more effective if they were made specifically for you,” he told her.  
  
“I'd rather not have to get new ones,” Toni said, staring wistfully at the amulet that was dangling from Hanna's hand. “I've just had it for so long, you know? It's kind of a memento now.”  
  
Hanna shook his head. “Oh, no, I didn't mean get rid of these ones! I meant, just, like, link them to you.” Toni didn't seem entirely sure, but she shrugged and nodded him on. “Okay, lemme fix 'em up. You got any super glue?”  
  
Toni was halfway done rummaging through the small chest of drawers in the bedside table before she paused and gave Hanna just the shortest of incredulous looks. “You're gonna fix it with super glue?”  
  
He didn't bother answering her, taking advantage of her short stunned silence and the time it took her to sort through the contents of Brandon's desk to draw a circular rune on the palm of each hand with a Sharpie marker he'd pulled out of his back pocket. He took the glue when Toni offered it, holding it in his finger tips to avoid smearing the marker ink on the insides of his hands. (He wondered briefly why anyone would have super glue in their nightstand, but otherwise ignored the idea.)  
  
“Uh...” Toni watched on as Hanna carefully coated one of the cracked amulets, holding it by the cord.  
  
“Now I need some of your blood,” the magic user told her. “Just a drop, right there in the middle.”  
  
Toni didn't fuss about the blood, as most supernatural folks would have done. She pricked her finger with a small knife she pulled out of the nightstand drawer, and let one small drop fall into the still-goopy glue covering the tile. The color of it spread slowly through the other liquid. Hanna held it up for Toni to see one last time, presenting it like a stage-show magician, then placed it between his own two palms.  
  
“Oh!” Toni gasped, reaching forward instinctively for a moment before pulling back and letting Hanna continue on with whatever it was he was doing, however insane it looked. (It was worth noting, to Hanna, at least, that Maurice didn't seem bothered by Hanna supposedly super-glueing his hands together. Whether that was because he recognized some of what Hanna was doing, or just trusted him, Hanna wasn't sure. Actually, it might also have been because the zombie simply wasn't familiar with the dangers of super-glue. He was really going to need a refresher course on modern-day hazards.)  
  
Hanna held his hands together for a moment, a look of concentration on his face that was (don't tell Toni) strictly for show, then turned to the wolf girl and opened them, presenting the fixed amulet with a wide grin.  
  
“Wha--?” She laughed, taking the necklace charm gingerly from Hanna's hands, which were perfectly clean, not a trace of stickiness or blood, runes gone.  
  
“Magic!” Hanna told her, dusting off his hands dramatically. Toni smiled, still gazing down at the amulet that was now whole and sported a shiny new coat of gloss. “It should be a lot more durable this time, and help keep a more stable form if you use your powers during a new moon, but I still wouldn't, I dunno, take a chainsaw to it or anything.”  
  
“Thank you,” she said, flickering her eyes up at Hanna and then back down to the amulet, as if she could hardly believe that it was fixed, despite seeing it with her own eyes. She rubbed it between her fingers like a worry-stone. “Really, thank you so much. I promise I'll get some sort of payment together for you as soon as Brandon wakes up.”  
  
“Eh, don't worry about it,” Hanna said with a careless hand wave. The part of him that wanted to eat dinner more than once a week protested the dismissal, but it didn't matter. “D'ya want me to do your brother's now too, or should I come back when he's feeling more up to losing some blood?”  
  
Toni nodded. “If you don't mind coming back. He should be up and about in a day or two. I'm sure he'll want to say thanks too, at least.” She accepted the second amulet back from Hanna.  
  
Hanna stood from where he'd sat cross-legged on the floor. (Maurice's hand steadied him as he wobbled on the way up.) “Sure, we'll come back in a couple days.” To be honest, he wasn't one hundred percent sure he'd be coming back in a couple days, given all the things that were possible and even _likely_ to happen within that span of time, and he was even less sure that _they'd both_ be coming back in a couple of days, for the same potential reasons, but he at least honestly intended to.  
  
“Okay, I guess we'll seen you then, then.” The were-girl stood and cast a quick glance over her brother to make sure he was still okay before leading the two paranormal investigators (she probably assumed they were both fully-fledged paranormal investigators, anyway, given the situation; in fact, she probably assumed a good many things about the two of them, given the situation, but that was just how it was when meeting new people, Hanna supposed) back downstairs to the front door. She unlatched it and held the door for them as they exited back out into the mid-day sunshine.  
  
Her eyes were peaceful when Hanna turned back to say goodbye, and the expression of true gratitude on her face made him nostalgic and several different sorts of pleased with the way things had turned out.  
  
They took the main roads on their way back home, instead of sticking to the shaded forest paths or side streets. It was that sort of middle of the day dead hour where nobody much felt like doing anything and nobody was likely to bother them for just walking down the sidewalk, even if they looked a bit funny. And it was a nice day, even nicer since the sun had fully risen and was now just on the beginning of its descent back down. Maurice must have thought it was comfortable as well; he was walking beside Hanna, instead of at his shoulder like he did usually. Was it such a bright, sunny day that it didn't feel to him like he needed to protect his small redheaded companion? Had he been lured into a sense of security by the relative ease of their werewolf recovery case? Hanna looked up at him and found he almost seemed to be smiling.  
  
“Well, I'd call that a success,” Hanna said conversationally.  
  
“How did you fix Miss Toni's necklace?” the zombie asked. His hands were back in his pockets again, Hanna noticed.  
  
“Oh, pfft, just a little alchemy,” he explained. “Nothing was missing, so it went back together plenty easy. I just drew the circles on my hands and used the glue because, I dunno, something to make it more crack resistant next time.”  
  
“You seem to know quite a variety of magics,” Maurice noted, looking... impressed? (Hanna wasn't _entirely_ sure. He didn't think his friend knew what Hanna was talking about, about alchemy, ...or phones, or various other things he'd mentioned in the past day; maybe that ignorance made it all seem more impressive than it really was.)  
  
He shrugged, like he didn't actually feel quite the twinge of pride when someone complimented the wideness of his magical repertoire. He'd gotten away from most of his bad habits from the past, but, well, pride wasn't exactly a bad habit anyway, was it? And there was nothing wrong with being a little proud of yourself every so often. He'd worked hard to acquire all these talents.  
  
“I try.”  
  
“Where did you learn such skills?” the zombie asked, not in an accusatory way or a small-talk way, but as if he was actually curious.  
  
“Eh,” Hanna said. He glanced around at the storefronts they were passing on their way home, a little fancier and a lot cleaner as they were still in the more upscale part of town. “Y'know. Here and there. Hey, you wanna go see if Worth's got those supplies yet?”  
  
Maurice (or perhaps rather... Zizka) didn't push for a more detailed answer, but he did frown at the suggestion that they check on the doctor. (Well, 'frown', less an expression of displeasure, more an indication of disagreement shown by a minute downward twitch of the lips.) “Do you think he will have had time to contact his supplier?”  
  
“No, you're probably right,” Hanna admitted. “Actually, he's probably still asleep. I guess we'll just, I dunno, go home for now?”  
  
“Wherever you like,” the undead man said, and his acquiescence was not surprising, but the gentleness of it was warm and nice and goodness today was turning out to be pretty enjoyable.  
  
They wandered back toward the apartment, Hanna noticing when they were a few blocks from home that Zizka had at some point ended up a step behind him, back at his shoulder again. He thought about bringing it up, but ended up just chuckling about it under his breath. No point in reminding his amnesiac friend about something he might not even realize he was doing and risk upsetting the balance they currently found themselves in. Also, as he was _considering_ mentioning it, they were entering the foyer of the apartment building, and the sudden presence of Mrs. Blaney interrupted his considerations, as it often did.  
  
“Who's your friend, Falk?” she croaked, raising a hungry eyebrow. Hanna shuddered despite himself but tried to keep the worst of the convulsions under control. Zizka shuffled slightly closer, looking concerned for him.  
  
“Just an old, uh, acquaintance,” he said, inching away. “You know. We've got a lot of catching up to do, so we're gonna...” He nodded up the stairs, tugging Zizka by the back of his coat. “See ya later, Mrs. Blaney!”  
  
He didn't stay to hear her response, certain enough it would be something sexually suggestive and not in the way that Worth's frequent suggestions to friends and customers alike to “sod off” and “go fuck yerself” were. The latter were infinitely more palatable, especially given their commonplace usage. The former, he would like to never hear again. So he high-tailed it up the stairs, skipping two or three at a time. (Zizka only had to take every other step to keep up with his pace, but still it was probably the fastest he'd 'ever' moved.)  
  
Once they were inside, Hanna breathed a short sigh of relief, partly at being home and partly at being away from Mrs. Blaney. She actually lived in the apartment next door, but because she was the landlady, she spent most of her time down in the front office, harassing tenants as they walked by. And after the first few times she'd been nosy about something she'd overheard him talking about with a client, Hanna had runed the thin walls for privacy. (She never seemed to overhear anything very detailed, but unfortunately that led to her creating even stranger explanations in her head, if Hanna was reading her right.)  
  
Zizka followed behind Hanna, closing the door with perhaps more force than he usually might, and a wary look at it like he wasn't sure it was enough to keep out the odd woman if she decided to follow. (It was; Hanna had stuck a rune on that too. It wouldn't stop most demons from entering, but it would keep Mrs. Blaney out, unless there was something he hadn't realized about her.) He turned away from it after a lingering moment, back toward Hanna, watching as the redhead replaced the ingredients he hadn't used earlier, and then watching as he stood around in the kitchen, glancing over his shoulder uneasily.  
  
Though clients were not uncommon, as far as visitors to Hanna's humble apartment went, not many were friends, and not many stayed very long at all, so he wasn't really sure what to... do... with them. Most people probably offered amenities like food and comfort, but he was a little understocked on snacks and didn't think a walking corpse would be all that interested in twinkies or cheetos anyway, and the springs in his threadbare couch were so sharp he couldn't, in good conscience, actually suggest that anyone sit on it (although his friend probably already had, after being abandoned so unceremoniously the night before).  
  
“Sooo...” Hanna said, facing Zizka. He leaned against the counter, his elbows up on it behind him.  
  
“So,” the zombie repeated, less exaggerated, stepping just inside the 'kitchen' half of the front room. His hands hadn't made it back into his pockets yet from when he'd closed the door, and they were sort of hanging at his sides lazily.  
  
_'So, what's up?'_ Hanna thought lamely, and regretted the word 'so'. What a dumb way to start a sentence. Very noncommittal. Very _him_ , admittedly, but dumb still, especially when trying to strike up a conversation with a reticent undead who was never very chatty even when he was living. Yeah, but the problem was, what _was_ there to say? _'Great weather today, right? Good day for a barbeque. Sorry it's my fault you can't actually_ eat _barbeque. Or anything.'_ Maybe he should just avoid talking to him altogether. Maybe they should spend the next few days just walking around the city. Walking was nice.  
  
“This is an interesting job you've created for yourself,” Zizka said, making Hanna's idea of silence between them rather moot.  
  
Well, he was reticent _most_ of the time. “Yeah, interesting is one word for it,” Hanna admitted with a wry smile. “I sure meet a lot of, uh, neat people.”  
  
Zizka looked around, like he was studying the magic-user's tiny dwelling, then asked, “Have you known Doctor Worth very long?”  
  
“Kinda,” Hanna said. “Depends what you consider 'long'. I met him a couple years back.”  
  
“That man, Conrad, said you met fifty years ago?”  
  
A stab of realization shot through Hanna. _'Shit, he's doing the thing,'_ he thought, trying to suppress a grimace at the impending loss of his secrets, because he'd been on the other side of this, this detective thing, and he knew how it was going to turn out. Zizka knew there was something going on, and Hanna's only defense would be to give up his least harmful secrets in order to protect his darker ones.  
  
“Uh, yeah, give or take,” he said. “I helped him with a vampire problem. Er, well, sort of. You know; you met him.”  
  
The zombie didn't raise his eyebrows, not even one of them; that was an expression he saved for more casual conversations. When there were answers to be had, nothing was strange, every piece of information was taken at face value. “You said magic was how you stayed so young. Did you discover a spell for youth?”  
  
“No, nothing like that,” Hanna replied, wholly honest. It was one thing he was fairly adamant about, not because he was morally opposed to prolonging his life on purpose, just that he didn't want to give anyone the wrong idea about... well, it was sort of complicated. “It was just... a side-effect, I guess, from the magic.”  
  
Zizka was standing quite still where he was; his hands had gone behind his back, not rigidly, more polite than military or something, but Hanna wished they could just sit down somewhere if they were gonna do this. His friend didn't seem to want to move, so he pulled himself up on the counter and sat cross-legged in the spot that wasn't cluttered with what little junk he had to clutter a counter with.  
  
“Are all magic-users immortal?”  
  
“No,” Hanna said, scoffing like that was ridiculous. “I mean, I'm pretty sure they're not. And I'm not immortal, I can still-- die.” He stuttered the slightest bit at the end, instinctively wary of admitting something like that to anyone, even Francesco, even though the ability to die, to be killed, was kind of a given for most people.  
  
Francesco nodded, maybe having already guessed that. “Then it's because of the necromancy?”  
  
_'Well, that's that, he's figured it out, goodbye world,'_ Hanna thought dramatically. “How much do you know?” he asked, hoping his face didn't look too anxious because he wanted to keep some semblance of pride and composure even if the situation was about to cross the border into Hell.  
  
“Of necromancy? Not much.”  
  
_'Wait...'_ The metaphorical gears turned in Hanna's head; they felt rusty in the wake of the sudden temporary shut-down of his adrenaline-and-worry-soaked brain, because hadn't Francesco just figured it out?  
  
“It's a black art, isn't it?” the zombie asked when Hanna didn't offer the explanation he was expecting, and this time it was a question, not a statement with a question-mark on the end of it, waiting to be used as evidence.  
  
“Some people think all magics are black arts,” Hanna said, words like a shrug. He knew Francesco would understand how very much that meant 'yes', but there was no way he could say necromancy _wasn't_ a black art. There was a reason he didn't do it anymore (-much, without good reason).  
  
“Then necromancers absorb the life from others?” Francesco hummed. He didn't seem to be accusing Hanna (which Hanna could hardly believe, despite all evidence, past and present), but simply puzzling over how it all worked.  
  
_'How pragmatic.'  
  
_ “I dunno,” Hanna said, giving an apologetic sort of smile and trying to keep it from fading too fast, because what was even happening? What did Francesco know or not know? His poor brain wasn't sure which emotion to settle on, and it was a little stressful, but he'd rather smile in the face of adversity than give in and cry. (Not that he was going to cry, not literally; he was pretty sure he'd used all his tears up a long time ago, cliché as that sounded.) “I never did it on purpose. I hardly even knew what I was doing half the time.”  
  
Francesco seemed to think that was sad. His eyebrows drew down quite far over his faintly-glowing eyes. “Does it bother you? Your... longevity?”  
  
Did it bother him? That wasn't a question most people asked when they found out he was “blessed” with eternal youth. It must have seemed so envious to everyone else, never to grow old and die. But ...yeah, it did bother him, didn't it? He wouldn't pretend he hadn't benefited from his extended life, or that it had all been bad. And in the beginning, he'd thought it was great, back when he first realized that everyone around him was getting older and he was following them at only a snail's pace. Even his hair and fingernails hardly grew anymore; he didn't have to cut either of them more than once a year. Most people would consider that a convenience, probably-- he certainly had. But then...  
  
He looked across the small kitchen at Fr... at the zombie of his old friend. He waited patiently for Hanna to answer, so patiently. That was something Hanna had tried to learn from him. He'd done okay with it, too, learned not to rush into things so much, learned to carefully evaluate his problems, but in the end it was not truly patience that had kept him going because there was nothing to be patient _about._ You needed something to look forward to for it be considered patience, didn't you? Without a goal, you just kept on going because there was nothing else to do. Just kept going forever and ever because you were “blessed”. People didn't know the half of it, didn't know the quarter of it, the tenth of it, didn't know anything of curses. People got to die if they were just patient enough.  
  
“Sometimes,” Hanna said. He didn't bother trying to make it not sound like 'usually'. Fr-... Francesco probably understood what he meant, the perceptive bastard.“But that's just how it is, I guess. No point in dwelling on it.” It was a piece of advice he'd been given many times, by people who only knew the barest outline of his story, and he tried to take it to heart. It only rarely worked.  
  
“I guess,” the zombie repeated, though it was clear he didn't entirely agree. He seemed to realize Hanna was bullshitting, but wasn't sure if he was going to call him on it or not. He apparently decided to leave the issue for now and instead steer the conversation in a slightly different direction (and the fact that he was steering the conversation at all was weird; he must have really been anxious to be so in the dark about the situation). “Are you very familiar with...” He looked down at himself, though none of his skin was visible, no evidence available. “-with the undead?”  
  
“Zombies?” Hanna clarified, pretty sure he knew what Francesco meant. (The word “zombie” hadn't really existed back in the day, so of course he would have defaulted to a more familiar, if sort of catch-all, word.) “Yeeah,” he said, drawing the word out a little longer than he meant to, “being a necromancer and all. But not like you. You're--” _'Special,'_ he thought. “--different.”  
  
“Am I?” Francesco asked, and he seemed really honestly surprised about that; curious.  
  
“Erm, yeah. Pretty different.”  
  
“How so?”  
  
Hanna wasn't sure how much he wanted to tell Francesco about reanimation. That was still pretty rocky ground right now, while they were still unsure where he came from or, rather, how. But a basic lesson in standard undead activity was easier and miles less uncomfortable (for him, at least) than talking about himself and how much immortality could suck. It couldn't hurt to tell him how unusual this case was. (Poor guy probably had no idea; Hanna had just dragged him around since last night and hadn't done much explaining. ...On purpose, of course, but it still had to be frustrating. The least he could do was give him a basic run-down of how things would _normally_ go. Then, if he understood how weird the situation was, maybe he would be less disappointed when they inevitably failed to fully solve the case, right?)  
  
“Most zombies--, you probably haven't seen any monster movies lately, but they're like that. Uh--” He put his arms out before him, hands twitching in a pretty decent imitation (not that most people would know) of a grabby but confused undead corpse, and adopted an expression he hoped was dead-eyed but still conveyed a sense of hunger and rage. (Not that “rage” was really an accurate description of an emotion a zombie was likely to feel. They were more likely to be annoyed because they had no idea what was going on, and not enough consciousness to process the information anyway.)  
  
A faint look of disgust crossed Francesco's face, and Hanna couldn't quite decide if he wanted to laugh or cry or bury his head in shame over making himself look like an idiot in front of someone who'd never seen a horror flick. (It was just a shadow of the emotion Hanna used to make fun of his partner for (seriously, what kind of cop was _squeamish?_ ), but seeing it there on his face was still a bit of an ordeal for his still-frazzled emotions.)  
  
“Uh, what I'm saying is they're kinda mindless,” he explained, putting his arms down with a sheepish kind of grin. (He'd bet his face was red.) Francesco gave a little sideways nod, though he still looked a bit grossed-out. “Some of them are just like regular people though. Just, y'know, dead. Undead. Like with their memories and personality intact and all that. So that's what's weird about you.”  
  
Francesco seemed to chew on this info for a minute. “Could I have lost my memory _before_ I died?”  
  
“I don't think so,” Hanna said with way too much certainty, before he could stop himself to think of an answer that sounded more plausibly deniable. “I mean, I've never seen that before.”  
  
“Isn't my whole situation new to you?” the zombie asked, clearly not willing to let Hanna off of this one so easily.  
  
“Ye-eah,” Hanna admitted. “I... guess you've got a point there, Francesco.”  
  
The man looked pleased to have gotten Hanna to concede to his idea, but he cocked his head at the name. “Francesco now?”  
  
“Ah, yeah, Zizka wasn't working.”  
  
Francesco's eyebrows inched closer to each other, then melted back down into a more comfortable position as he caught on. “You didn't like Aleksey?”  
  
Hanna laughed. “Pfft, Aleksey? Aleksey was _hours_ ago!”  
  
Francesco (no, no, they had to move on now; maybe Gaius?) smiled, a smile that showed mostly in the shine in his eyes. It was a good smile. Hanna could tell though that he was wondering just how many names they were likely to go through before the case was solved. (On his side of the kitchen, Hanna was thinking how glad he was to have had a whole lifetime to pick up names, because if things went his way, he'd need them all.)  
  
Joking about names seemed to be the icebreaker Hanna had been hoping for the whole time. He felt a lot more at ease now, maybe even enough to sit on the couch. To that effect, he slid off the counter top and made his way over to the living room half of the tiny apartment's front room, gesturing for Gaius to follow him. (Or, it was more like a gesture that Gaius could follow him if he wanted and it was totally up to him, y'know, whatever, but there probably wasn't a really noticeable difference between the two gestures.) He perched himself on one of the arms of the couch, letting his feet take the springy cushion.  
  
“Thanks for bearing with me,” he said as Gaius sat on the edge of the other couch arm. “I usually try to solve cases as quick as possible but this one's--”  
  
“Unusual,” Gaius finished, shrugging. “I understand.”  
  
“I was gonna say 'weird', but yeah.” He shifted on the couch arm; it was better than sitting on the cushions properly, but it was still pretty hard. (And, as Lamont liked to point out, Hanna had like _negative_ amounts of ass to protect his poor butt bones. (Apparently this sort of commentary happened because Lamont was from a big Italian family where the tradition was to point out each other's body flaws while piling their plates full of spaghetti. According to Worth, it meant he really liked you.)) “I'm glad you're not super impatient about it.”  
  
The zombie didn't fidget; discomfort probably wasn't a big concern for him. “I'll wait as long as necessary,” he said, “but I'm still concerned. Particularly after what you told me of _most_ ...'zombies'.”  
  
Of course he was worried. Most people wouldn't be; after hearing they were different, most people would have accepted it as an unchanging fact. Kind of dumb, actually, how fearless mortals could be, always taking the slightest hint and deciding 'it won't happen to me'. Right now, Hanna wished his friend could be that way, just for once.  
  
“I wouldn't worry about it,” he told Gaius, although that was a bold-faced lie, because heck yeah he'd worry about it. He was worrying about it right now.  
  
“Am I not at risk of becoming mindless?”  
  
...Hanna sighed internally. He was becoming tired. Lying was becoming tiring. He was becoming sick of it. _'Not as sick as you'll be if he finds out the truth,'_ he thought to himself. _'Not as bad as you'll feel if you waste your second chance because your conscience was itchy.'_ So, near-truth white lies it was, then.  
  
“Nah,” he said, shrugging with his head. “If anything happens, I can handle it. It'll be fine, dude.”  
  
Gaius didn't think much of Hanna's self-confidence, or he thought _too_ much of the potential risk Hanna was waving away like a gnat. “I don't want to harm you.”  
  
“Wh-what?” Hanna's mind blanked for a minute, and he struggled to get the thoughts back on it and in order. That was-- well, to be expected, he guessed. Gaius was a nice guy, a guardian type, of course he didn't want to hurt anybody, least of all Hanna, since Hanna was his key to figuring out why he was dead but still walking. Of course. B-but Hanna wasn't the only magic-user in the city, and probably not the only one who had experience with necromancy. If Gaius slipped and went all brain-eater on Hanna (god, what a horrible fucking thought (he was probably shaking now), because if that happened, if Gaius attacked him, no way would Hanna be able to defend himself; not because he couldn't, but because he _couldn't),_ and then woke up and still needed someone to help him, he could definitely find someone. And if he went all brain-eater and _didn't_ wake up, then who cares? because they'd both be dead. “Uh, i-if you're worried, I can give you the number for some other mages I know, in case something happens to me, so then you can still, y'know, get all... fixed up--”  
  
The zombie looked at him like he had something strange growing on his face, and Hanna wondered if he _was_ shaking badly. He put his hands on his thighs and his fingers grabbed at his jeans instinctively (strange how distress made you want to squeeze things), but he didn't feel himself shaking, just tense.  
  
“I came to you for a reason,” the man said. “I don't know why, but it was you I came to. I don't want someone else's help.” And with this, he _did_ look fairly accusatory, like he thought Hanna was trying to pawn him off on someone else, or he could tell the magician knew more than he was letting on about _why_ it was Hanna he'd come to.  
  
_'Okay, that's reasonable,'_ Hanna thought, mentally holding up his hands against his zombie friend's intensity. God this conversation was a roller-coaster. “Fair enough,” he said, taking a deep breath just to reset his nerves. “We'll go to Worth's place tomorrow, first thing in the morning! If he doesn't have the stuff yet, we'll go track down Lamont and get it ourselves. But, uh, I'm really bushed right now, y'know, tracking down werewolves and all, tiring business, so, uh, I'm gonna get some shut-eye if you don't mind.”  
  
Gaius's shoulders sagged minutely, a good centimeter or so that would have been comically low compared to his usual range of movements if Hanna was in the mood to think anything was funny. He looked like he was going to stop Hanna as the redhead sprung up from the couch arm, but instead he just said, “Good night, then,” adding a quiet “sleep well” when Hanna waved his own stunted 'good night'.  
  
Bed was probably only fifteen feet away, but he couldn't get there fast enough. When he'd slithered under his perfect pile of blankets and drew them around himself like a protective barrier against emotional instability (an ineffective one; an underpowered placebo), he took a deep breath. He held it, feeling it fill him, before eventually letting it escape. 15 feet away, the other inhabitant of the sad little apartment _didn't_ breathe, hadn't for a hundred or more years. Thirty-six and a half thousand days, give or take. Thirty-six and a half thousand days, Hanna had learned to be without him, and now twenty-four hours _with_ was undoing him. Fifteen feet of self-imposed distance was too much. It was _all_ too much. The secrets, the truths, all too much.  
  
What a day. What a... mess.  
  
He was tired. He needed to sleep, to rest...  
  
his soul... must still be black...  
  
not atoned enough... he needed...  
  
to apologize...  
  
to make him...  
  
stay...


	4. Chapter 4

“Hanna Cross?”  
  
_'Go away.'_  
  
...he needed...  
  
Knock knock knock.  
  
...to _'ughhh...'_ answer the door.  
  
He was still wearing his clothes from the previous night, which had fortunately not involved mud or digging (the corpse whose information was needed was freshly dead; suspiciously fresh, in fact, but he was not about to question the men who were offering to pay him so handsomely with so little prying on his methods), so he was at least clothed enough to answer the insistent knocking, if he could bother to sit up from where he had _just laid down._  
  
A cat's gentle meow came from the floor beside the bed as another knock came, with what sounded like a desperate introduction of sorts that was muffled by another of Hanna's weary sighs.  
  
“Yes, Sabo, thank you,” Hanna said, letting his hand fall to pet the cat with as little effort as possible. “I am aware there's a man at the door.”  
  
“If someone is home, I need to speak with Hanna Cross please,” the voice from the hallway said, sounding hopeful that the murmuring and rustling from inside meant he wasn't knocking in vain.  
  
“Be a good familiar and get the door, would you?” Hanna mumbled to the cat (who showed no inclination toward listening to the request), even as he slowly pulled himself to his feet. “Just a minute,” he said in the direction of the door, only slightly louder than the voice he'd used with Sabo. The almost tangible relief from the other side proved how awful and thin his door was. He stretched and scrubbed a hand back through his hair, then opened the door as wide as the chain latch would allow.  
  
“May I speak with Hanna Cross?” the tall dark-haired man asked. “It's fairly urgent.”  
  
Hanna almost said, _'Do you have any money?'_ , but he thought he'd heard the man claim he was with the police when he first knocked, so he decided to be a bit more cordial, in case they were in the mood for arresting grumpy necromancers. “How can I help?”  
  
The officer seemed glad for the cooperation, but wasn't fully understanding the situation. “I'd like to talk with Hanna personally.”  
  
“You're talking with Hanna currently,” he told the officer, doing his best to restrain any sarcastic commentary that threatened to slip out.  
  
“O-oh.” The man's eyes widened, and he gave the visible slice of Hanna a quick once-over. As he surely noticed, Hanna was slight and young, but not feminine; he had no beard or mustache, but hair was beginning to creep down the sides of his face toward his vaguely square jawline, and he had no curves to speak of. “I'm sorry. I was expecting a woman.”  
  
It seemed the officer was not a threat, so Hanna unlatched the chain and opened the door wide enough that they could speak properly. “Who did you get my name and address from? They didn't tell you I was a man?”  
  
“I must have assumed,” the man said, straightening his posture from how it had fallen in his shock. “I've not heard of a male witch before.”  
  
Hanna would have liked to berate the man for his ignorance on both his name and occupation (good lord, he was not a _witch_ ), but he'd gotten the same thing from others before (not _many_ , as he did most of his non-anonymous business through couriers). And this man had come to him for some reason, so he wanted to get on with whatever job apparently required him at such an ungodly morning hour. “What was it you needed?”  
  
“Thank you,” the man said, snapping back into near-perfect professionalism. “There have been several murders this past night. They're unlike anything the police force is used to seeing. They look to have been mauled quite messily.”  
  
“You're asking me to track down a vicious murderer?”  
  
“I thought you might be able to help,” the officer said with a nod.  
  
Murders were dangerous; Hanna didn't like getting involved with them, particularly not _maulings._ He grimaced. It was too early. “What gives you that idea?” he asked, hoping the officer might reconsider and leave him be. Police didn't pay well anyway.  
  
The officer leveled him with a stare that clearly insinuated he thought Hanna was being obtuse. “I was told you speak to the dead. If you could speak with the victims, perhaps they could tell us who or what did this.”  
  
The man was being surprisingly straightforward about his intention to utilize Hanna's dark talents. Most people would have skirted the issue, if they understood or believed his abilities at all. That was admirable, but Hanna still didn't want to get involved. What he wanted was to go back to his bed and burrow under his blankets and cats.  
  
“Sorry, I'm busy,” he said.  
  
“Please,” the man said, catching the door as Hanna moved to close it, then looking mildly surprised at himself, as if such brash tactics went against his training. “There may be more casualties if we don't catch the murderer.”  
  
“That's what police are for.”  
  
“I know,” the officer said, shamed. “But the families of the victims deserve peace, even if that comes from outside the force.”  
  
_'I shouldn't have answered the door,'_ he thought. _'Sabo, you're a horrible familiar.'_ Families were his weak point. He thought about a child learning that their father had been slaughtered by some unknown beast, scarred not only by his gruesome death but by every shadow that stalked them at night for the rest of their life, every one of them with glaring red eyes and claws as sharp as the imagination could conjure.  
  
“Fine,” he said, pushing the officer from the doorway and stomping out into the hallway with him, as much annoyance as he could muster in each forceful step. (It wasn't too hard to feign; he was still quite tired.) He shut the door behind him, but didn't bother locking it: a rune on the other side kept anyone but him from turning the nob, although he was aware if anyone really wanted in, they'd likely just break the door down, and with little effort. He nodded at the officer to lead the way. “We can talk about payment on the way.”  
  
“Of course,” the officer said. His voice sounded warm, and Hanna had the sneaking suspicion his grouching wasn't working on the man.  
  
It was a gloomy day, as usual, but not too cold. Despite the fairly pleasant weather, which seemed to carry less illness, Hanna was stopped on the way by several of his beggar patrons, who bought charms off him. These days he always carried a few of each popular type so he didn't miss out on sales when people recognized him and made desperate requests. He realized that probably meant he was being too high-profile, if more than a few people were recognizing him when he was simply walking down the street, but it was making him money, so he couldn't bother being more discreet.  
  
The periodic stops to sell his wares made the officer seem increasingly more tense, but Hanna was doing him a favor, and therefore the man could simply deal with it. They did eventually reach an alley that was blocked off by uniformed guards, and the officer was about to lead Hanna past them, but the magic-user stopped him several yards short.  
  
“Wait. The body is back there?”  
  
“Yes,” the officer said. “It was just discovered several hours ago.”  
  
Hanna glared at the man and wondered almost aloud if he was an idiot. “I thought it would have been moved somewhere private! I can't wake a dead person here!”  
  
The officer looked thoughtful, as if Hanna's statement was an unexpected new piece to the puzzle. “Hmm. I may be able to have the guards move a street down. Would that be private enough?”  
  
The full cover of darkness in the middle of an empty cemetery was hardly private enough for Hanna's liking when black magic was still technically a hanging offense, but he supposed it would have to do. “If that's all you can manage,” he said, glancing sidelong at the guards, who looked very much as if they would probably not be comfortable seeing a reanimated corpse.  
  
“Do you have any more of those things you sold to those beggars back there?”  
  
“The deathwards?” He rummaged through his pockets and handed the few he found over to the officer, who took them and headed straight over to the guards. Hanna followed just far enough to be somewhat within earshot.  
  
The officer's voice was a soft rumble he couldn't quite make out, but the guards did not bother to keep their voices low in their responses.  
  
“Contagious?! Why the hell did they not tell us sooner?” They conferred more quietly with the officer for another moment before nodding with a distinct conviction that seemed more personal than professional and grabbing the charms the man offered them. They each retreated hastily to the far ends of the narrow streets they were at the intersection of, covering their mouths with handkerchiefs and coat collars as they hurried.  
  
“Will that do?” the officer asked when he returned.  
  
“Hopefully,” Hanna responded, although he was sure it would be more than enough. No guard, no matter how dedicated to his job or curious about voices coming from the vicinity of what ought to be a dead person, would risk coming any closer than was strictly necessary to a body that might be infected. It was a clever thing to have told them, and secretly Hanna added it to his repertoire of excuses for getting people away from bodies he needed access to.  
  
The corpse was bloody, bloodier than almost any Hanna had dealt with before. Most of the time, the bodies he came in contact with had been cleaned up by undertakers and dressed up nicely; they tended to look fancier than the living folks he met. This one had not had such a treatment. It was a woman, from the looks of the shredded skirt and blood-matted hair. Trying not to step in the puddle of blood she was laying in, Hanna stepped close and reached over to pull her so that she was sitting up against the brick wall behind her. He dug several little pouches out of his coat and set about laying the necessary circles around the woman, hoping he'd brought enough for a circle wide enough to avoid the pool of blood. He looked over his shoulder, still wary that someone might wander near, despite the guards. The officer was standing at a good distance back, watching him work with warring expressions of distaste and determination.  
  
“What?” Hanna asked, allowing himself a light smirk. “Are you not used to bloody corpses?”  
  
The officer shook his head briefly. “I've only seen a few yet. I'm still quite new to this.” He looked a bit like he wanted to be sick. “You've seen your fair share, I imagine?”  
  
“My fair share,” Hanna agreed. “But not like this. Not this... soaked.”  
  
She really was quite coated in what he assumed to be her own blood. Along with the reanimation spell, he added one for calming, as he was not at all in the mood to risk the woman panicking when she noticed the state of her body, and starting the rest of the city into a panic at her screams. Before starting the ritual, he reached back over to her and carefully picked a ribbon out of her hair, balling it up into his fist to hold while they worked.  
  
He was about to start when he noticed the officer was still some yards away. “You want to speak with her, don't you? I don't intend to do _your_ job too.”  
  
“Of course,” he said, heading over with only slightly faltering steps. He looked uneasy to be this close, but he also appeared genuinely interested in what was about to happen. _'As he should,'_ Hanna thought. Magic was fascinating, and the greater population's avoidance of it was unfortunate and ridiculous.  
  
Hanna situated himself right next to the woman, adjacent to the brick wall, and pointed to a spot in what would be the woman's line of sight when she woke. “Stand over there, so you're the first person she sees. You're more attractive. She'll probably respond better to you. Wait, hold this.” He handed the officer the bundle of ribbon then shooed him back over to his assigned position. The officer said nothing, simply nodding and following Hanna's instructions, which was a relief to Hanna; working with living people could be such a hassle. They always seemed to have a “better” idea of how to do things. (Forlorn lovers were the _worst._ )  
  
He waited for the officer to give him the go-ahead nod, then hovered his hands above the woman's heart and said the incantation that by this point was more common to him than his own name.  
  
The woman gasped as she opened her eyes, as if waking from a horrible nightmare. She calmed visibly upon seeing the officer, but the fact that she was frightened at all was a testament to how badly scared she had been. Any normal amount of fright should have been neutralized by the calming charm he'd added.  
  
It wasn't clear if she might have been a _ma'am_ instead, but in a short moment after she caught his eye, still fearful (the both of them), the officer said, “Miss, can you tell me what happened here last night?”, careful not to be too blunt, not to mention her sad state, in case she didn't realize.  
  
“There was this _beast_ ,” she said, what was left of her face contorting into an expression of horror at the memory. The officer tried not to let his face follow suit at the sight of her mangled facial features moving in terrible unnatural ways. “It came from the shadows, it was so fast, I couldn't get away! I'm--...” She looked down at herself, studying the blood and tatters of her clothing as if they were something she couldn't quite recognize. “I'm, I'm bleeding. Am I going to be okay?” Her gaze slid over to Hanna, who she seemed to have just noticed, then back to the officer, eyes begging for reassurance.  
  
“Um. Can you tell me more about this beast? Could you describe it for me?”  
  
The woman did not seem interested in the beast any longer. She looked back down at herself, drowsily placed a hand on a long gash in her side as if trying to stop the flow. (Hanna had not bothered with bestowing upon her much mobility; it was not really necessary for something like this. Quite necessary not to, in fact.) Then she looked very confused that the pressure didn't cause any pain.  
  
“What is going to happen to me?” she asked the officer, pleading.  
  
He shook his head and looked to Hanna for the answer, clearly and explicitly uncomfortable with the situation. The woman turned to Hanna as well, wanting answers from wherever they might come.  
  
Hanna held back a sigh. “Did you say your prayers?”  
  
“Every night,” the woman replied, jerking her head lazily up and down in a manner that suggested she was trying to nod quickly.  
  
“I suppose you'll go to Heaven, then.” He turned to the officer and shrugged in the direction they'd arrived from. “I don't think you'll get much more from this one,” he said. “I suggest trying the others.” He stood and dusted himself off.  
  
“Wait, but, the woman?” He looked down at her, and she stared back.  
  
“Hnn? Oh.” Hanna reached over with his foot and disrupted the sand circle, and she fell back against the wall, lifeless once more.  
  
The officer stared at her a few moments, much longer than Hanna would allot, if this case was as urgent as the man seemed to think. “She's dead again?”  
  
“She's been dead the whole time,” Hanna told him. “Where were the other bodies? Hopefully they'll be a little more informative. I suppose I should add a directive charm to the next one.” He started off down the alley.  
  
Blood-stained ribbon still in hand, the officer hung back. He looked down at it, then knelt down and tied it in a quick bow around the woman's wrist before following after Hanna, who was waiting at the mouth of the alley with an impatience held in check mostly by the thought of getting paid. (His conscience sat quietly in the back of his mind. He ignored it as much as possible. He was already doing as the officer asked; he needn't be _emotional_ about it as well.)  
  
They wasted no time getting to the second body (other than the short stops for Hanna to sell his amulets; business didn't stop just because there was a murderer afoot), and the officer used the same tactic as before to get the guards away. Hanna was glad he'd stuffed so many amulets in his pockets before going out last night, but he was going to need quite a lot of compensation if this officer insisted upon giving so many of them away. He wasn't a god damn charity, least of all to city guards.  
  
Upon coming to the second victim, Hanna repeated the process while the officer watched, seeming slightly less disgusted than previously (though this body was similarly bloody. One of the elderly man's arms was even entirely severed).  
  
In place of the woman's ribbon, Hanna went through the man's pockets and handed the officer a pocket watch he found. “Fancy,” he said, admiring it for just a second before saying the words to bring the man back to them.  
  
The old man woke with a start, looking not fearful but surprised. “Oh, my,” he said, putting a hand to his heart as if to still its imagined frantic beating. “You shocked me quite badly!” The man laughed faintly.  
  
“I'm sorry,” the officer said. “I meant no harm.”  
  
“No, of course not.” The man sat up straighter, as much as he could with what little control he had over his body. “Must have simply been your shadow. It looked like a dog as you approached. You know, I hate dogs. Was there something you needed of me, young man?”  
  
The officer stared at the old man. “A dog, you said? You weren't... attacked?”  
  
The old man stared at the officer. “Attacked? No, certainly not. What are you on about, young man?”  
  
“Damn, this one doesn't know anything,” Hanna said, grimacing. The old man startled and turned to him with an, 'excuse me!' “He must have been killed instantly,” he said, pointing out how one of the deep gashes hidden in the forest of shredded flesh was right across his throat.  
  
“Fortunate for him,” the officer mentioned, frowning. “I suppose we should move on to the last one then.”  
  
The old man bristled and moved to pick himself up from the ground. “What nonsense are the two of you--?” Hanna disrupted the circle before the man's shambling could.  
  
“What a waste,” Hanna grouched, mourning the fullness of his ingredient pouches.  
  
Returning the pocket watch to the man's corpse, the officer took a moment to look over his injuries a little more closely. “A dog... Hmm.” The slashes all over the old man's body _were_ messier than one would expect if the killer had been using a knife, or even a multi-point tool like a pitchfork. “Mr. Cross, is there any way you could determine what kind of weapon left these marks?”  
  
Hanna wandered back over to the body. “What? You mean with magic?” He thought about it. It wasn't anything he'd done before, but that didn't mean he _couldn't._ There might be some way he could twist one of his current spells to suit this need, or perhaps another way of looking at the question. He could maybe summon a spirit, ask if they'd seen what transpired here, but it was daylight and spirits were finicky. That wouldn't work. He'd have to try something else. “There might be,” he said, as a thought swirled around in his brain. There was a spell he hadn't had much use for, a mundane thing he'd picked up from somewhere or another that allowed for following someone, but before you could follow, you had to find.  
  
“Hold a minute,” he muttered to the officer as he sorted through the contents of his pockets. Pouches of sand, dusts, and powders... Those wouldn't be any use, unless he wanted to waste them all in the wind. Maybe... water?  
  
“Have you thought of something?” the officer asked, looming behind the necromancer and his assorted pouches.  
  
“Get me a bucket of water,” he said, still in thought. The officer seemed unsure about leaving Hanna to sit in the street by himself, next to a bloody corpse and the flies it was starting to attract, but he nodded and trotted off down the road, returning a few minutes later to find Hanna had returned his ingredients to his pockets and was waiting there, holding a small feather and looking more excited than he meant for anyone to see.  
  
“Here.” The officer set the bucket down in front of the magic-user, careful not to slosh it around and lose any of the water, particularly since he didn't know what Hanna needed it for. Then he backed up and watched curiously.  
  
Hanna moved the bucket over a few feet, right in front of where the old man had fallen. He took a deep breath, concentrated hard for a moment, and dropped the feather in the bucket. It floated down and settled in the still water, drifting just the slightest bit but not with any apparent magical intent.  
  
It wasn't working. There was something missing. He expected that, to some degree, because he'd never really used this spell before and elements were just as finicky as spirits, but in different ways. _'Think,'_ he said to himself. _'What elements am I using? Water. Air.'_ What water and air had in common was a desire to flow. So maybe he had to give them that.  
  
For a minute he considered dumping the water in a small pot-hole some yards away, until he noticed the old man's top hat was nice and flat. It wasn't perfect, but it would do, as long as it hadn't gotten caught in the path of the murderer's blade. There was a small slice in it, but only on the brim, so Hanna snatched it from the corpse's head and set it upside-down next to the bucket. (He wouldn't steal from a dead person, even though he had every opportunity to, but this was not _theft_ , it was appropriation! Besides, he was working with the police, and therefore had some amount of sanction to fall back on.)  
  
He took another deep breath, tried to clear his head of the noise of the city, of the paranoia instinctive to him when normal folks were around, then poured the water gently from the bucket into the hat. Sure enough, the water was swirling softly around the hat, like it was being stirred by an invisible ladle. Glimpses of images could be seen in the folds of the liquid, people in motion, walking about the town or tidying their homes or begging in the gutters. The officer leaned down next to Hanna and they both marveled at it for a few quiet moments.  
  
“Amazing,” the officer said, just shy of breathless. “This is really magic.”  
  
“Speaking to the dead was _not?_ ” Hanna asked, mostly joking; he was aware how much more fantastical this was than talking corpses. He was a bit entranced by it as well. But not enough to forget what they were doing. “What are we looking for?”  
  
The officer's eyes narrowed as he considered the limited evidence they had to work with currently. “Can you find a man a little shorter than this victim?”  
  
Hanna wasn't sure what exactly he could find with this spell; ideally it was a _following_ spell, but you had to know who you were following first. He concentrated on the images, grabbing the edges of the hat just in case physical contact had any impact. The pictures in the water began to filter through only men, only a bit shorter than the old victim. Nothing seemed special to him about any of them, but he went along with the officer's suggestion. He looked over his shoulder and saw the officer frowning as he studied the swiftly-changing images.  
  
“A man with a blade?” The water began to show men who presumably owned blades, but it was such a vague detail it was hard to know. “A man with a pitchfork.” The images changed slightly to show men who were mostly working on farms, or milling around the farming quarter of the city. The officer sighed, clearly no more able than Hanna to determine who might be the killer from the line-up of all the blade or pitchfork owning men who had come down this road any time recently. “A dog,” he suggested, probably grasping at possibilities.  
  
Pictures of dogs replaced the men swirling around in the hat and Hanna let out a puff of laughter. “Or did you mean perhaps a man, _with_ a dog?” he asked, voice heavy with the vague disdain he liked to feel for idiots. A dog would be a pretty good weapon for a murderer to use, but a dog murdering people of its own accord was a little farfetched. Surely, rabid dogs attacked people often enough, but they weren't especially stealthy. It certainly would have been put down by now.  
  
“No, a dog,” the officer said quietly, concentrating on the images as they swirled into being. “Or... a canine.”  
  
“What is the difference?” Hanna asked rhetorically as he gripped the sides of the hat and focused on _canines_ over dogs. “Do you think a fox might be the killer?”  
  
The officer didn't pay much attention to Hanna's attempts at patronizing him. “Not a fox,” he said, watching the water. It was good that he did not want a fox, because they didn't see any in the swirling images. In fact, specifying 'canine' didn't seem to have any effect at all, at least until something finally caught the man's attention. “Did you see that?” he asked.  
  
“Hnn?” Hanna had zoned out and started idly planning where to restock some of his wasted ingredients from, because searching for a dog was beyond idiotic and not worth his time, but he shook it from his head at the officer's raised voice. “What was it?”  
  
“Wolves,” he said. “Several of them.” He turned to Hanna, equal parts confusion and determination in his expression. “This shows people who have passed by here?”  
  
“Mm-hmm.” Hanna was still sort of bored; dogs didn't interest him that much, and neither did wolves, although he supposed he could get a better quality of ingredients from a wolf than the dead mutts he sometimes scavenged. (These days he paid the street kids for them instead of doing the dirty work himself.)  
  
“Why would a wolf have been in the city?” the officer asked, almost to himself.  
  
That... was a good question, Hanna had to admit. Wolves weren't exactly considered harmless pests; if a wolf had been spotted even in the outskirts of the city, it would have been killed immediately. “You think it was a pack of wolves that killed this man?” He inspected the corpse again, and now that he thought of it, the cuts all over the man's body really were more like tears, as if caused by claws or fangs. He was beginning to think the officer's instinct to look for a dog might not have been as insane as he thought.  
  
“Can you find those wolves?” the officer asked, leaning intently over the hat.  
  
Hanna replaced his hands on the brim and concentrated again, and the watery image settled into a vision of a pack of wolves, just as the officer had said. So he stood, took another deep breath, and dropped the tiny, slightly-damp feather into what remained of the water in the mostly-water-tight hat. It swirled around with the current for a few turns, then stopped at the edge. The water below still seemed agitated but the feather was no longer caught in its incessant spiraling. Hanna picked up the damp hat, gently, and faced the direction of the feather.  
  
“This way,” he told the officer, excited that the spell had worked, but hesitant to follow it through. He had various protecting charms on him, and a few quick spells he could use offensively, but he'd never tested them on anything that wasn't human. Wolves were still mortal, yes, but spells were more discriminatory than traditional weaponry.  
  
The officer seemed to notice his wariness. “Don't be worried,” he said, pulling his pistol from the holster at his side and motioning with it. “I can protect us.”  
  
Part of Hanna took offense at that, but the other part was reassured, and a bit confused at the feeling that he might be able to trust another person not only to be competent in a dangerous situation, but with his own safety as well. He didn't thank the officer but he started off in the feather's direction, the man following at his shoulder.  
  
The morning was long gone by now, the bright overcast of the afternoon having taken its place. The officer had replaced his pistol in its holster, but kept his hand near it as they slowly followed the feather's guidance further and further from the rich city center and toward the rundown slums that seemed to have been _built_ that way. Hanna had done a lot of work in this part of town over the past few years; it was where his first sales had come from, and where many of his regular buyers spent their non-begging hours. He wasn't afraid of the area, in fact it felt comfortable to him in a way, but he knew how unpredictable it was. People in dire straits lived by different rules, and this whole town was in a perpetually dire strait.  
  
The evening gloom was just beginning to encroach as the feather brought them to a compound of dilapidated shacks, built shoulder to shoulder with tall mismatched fencing closing off the short alleys between them, making it a pauper's fortress. As they were tracking wild animals (which still seemed insane), Hanna assumed the hat would lead them to the forest that lay some distance still behind the building, but as he circled behind the compound, the feather rotated in the hat to point directly at the building from any angle they approached. He looked back down at what remained of the water and found that instead of a _pack_ of wolves, the picture showed a _single_ wolf and several humans who sat around it, stroking its fur.  
  
Hanna stopped in mid-step, and the officer almost ran into him. He grabbed the man's sleeve and yanked him back into the shadow of a shack behind them, water sloshing slightly. “Look at this!” he whispered loudly, still staring at the _humans._ “Look! They were just wolves, weren't they?”  
  
“They're humans now...” The officer leaned over to have a closer look at the shallow layer of water in the hat, eyebrows drawing down in something like confusion.  
  
That hadn't been what Hanna had meant; he simply meant there had only been wolves before, and where had they gone? and where had the humans come from? But it dawned on him that the officer was right again, whether he meant to be or not.  
  
“They're shapeshifters,” Hanna said faintly, his eyes unfocused as he thought about the implications of that. It changed everything, or at least his personal feelings of security. Those offensive spells he had, which he'd only tested on humans... they _may_ have worked on mortal wolves, but shapeshifters were an entirely different question. Shapeshifters were something he was only vaguely familiar with, something his teacher had only just mentioned in passing, but with a shudder. Were they even mortal? He had a thought that they might even be demons, as those were the only creatures he knew of personally who were able to change form at will. The idea that they could be demons set him on edge. He'd dealt with a demon before, in a way, but it was not something he ever looked forward to and, indeed, was one of his only truly bad experiences with magic.  
  
The officer pulled out his gun and looked back at the compound that supposedly housed the pack of shape-changing creatures, staring so hard it was almost _audible._  
  
“You aren't still going after them, are you?” Hanna asked, incredulous and almost frightened enough to admit it. He checked the water in the hat again, and most of it was gone but he could still see the one wolf and several people, all looking a bit sleepy, but probably in possession of at least ten sets of claws between them, if he was right. Murderers were bad, wolves weren't great, and demons were horrifying; altogether, they made remaining in this situation inadvisable at best.  
  
“If they're dangerous, they have to be dealt with,” the officer said, sounding as if he actually believed the words that were coming out of his mouth, to Hanna's dismay.  
  
“Getting yourself killed by demons doesn't help anyone!” He checked the water again, compulsively, but nothing in the scene had changed. “Least of all me,” he added with a grumble. “We still haven't discussed payment.” In all honesty, not having this man's death on his conscience was of higher importance than what little money he could probably squeeze out of the police force for his help, but he found people responded better to business complaints than personal ones.  
  
“If I die, you can just bring me back,” the officer said, and it was clearly a joke (hardly more than deadpan, though obviously said in jest) but Hanna still bristled at it. “I'm going to have a look. Stay here.”  
  
“Not likely,” Hanna said with a scoff, following close behind as the man started toward the one opening in the circle of walls and fences. As much as he didn't want to be near these things, he certainly didn't want to be caught on his own by one of them, and if a pack of them was living in the compound, who knew how many more were outside of it.  
  
The officer didn't protest, for which Hanna was again grateful. They stepped as lightly as they could up to the opening, and Hanna noticed a bit belatedly just how quiet it was in the area, how few people there were around. Actually, there was not a single person visible on the block, no mothers gathering laundry, no children running in the streets as they waited on dinner. The last people he'd seen were several streets back, before the sun had started to dip. He supposed that made sense... particularly as they suddenly found themselves surrounded by angry-looking wolves.  
  
Admittedly, wolves always looked angry in Hanna's opinion, but these were snarling directly at him and likely were possessed by demons, which made them appear angrier in his mind. They had appeared almost as if from the lengthening shadows and closed in on the two of them before they even had a chance to realize. Hanna put his hand in one of his outside pockets and grabbed a fist full of his disorienting dust, doubtful as he was that it would do any good. The officer had his pistol cocked and aimed at the closest wolf. The two of them stood back to back, pressed together each in the only direction that was away from the beasts, and they waited what seemed like several long minutes for something to happen.  
  
When something finally did happen, it was in the opposite direction than they were expecting. Instead of lunging at them and tearing the two humans to horrible shreds, the wolves backed down. Hanna thought a few of them looked disappointed, though he was probably imagining it. They lowered their heads and looked into the shadows of the entrance to the patchwork mansion as a woman emerged from it.  
  
“Be glad I was here to call them off,” she said, approaching them without any obvious malice, but also without any obvious fear of the officer's drawn pistol. “They're a bit on edge this evening, so I suggest you leave before my authority is not enough to dissuade them from becoming violent.”  
  
The officer lowered his gun but didn't return it to its holster. “I can't leave yet. I think you know why.”  
  
The woman _tsk_ 'd, folding her arms, not like one would when they were bored, but like one would when they were _right._ “Is that really wise?”  
  
“I second that question,” Hanna mumbled. He still had a handful of powder clutched in his fist, held so tight it was trickling out between the gaps. He glanced around at the wolves. Most of them had retreated to their leader's side, but a few were still behind them, no longer snarling, but standing at attention and watching his actions carefully, so he discarded his tentative plan of making a mad dash to safety. He was small and fairly quick for a human, but he had no doubts about the speed of a demon wolf.  
  
“Is it wise to protect a murderer?” the officer countered the woman, ignoring Hanna's remark. “Do you intend to risk the safety of your entire family to save one?”  
  
Hanna would have liked to say that the officer's question made some of the wolves turn to their leader in uncertainty, but it did not. The question did not seem to phase the woman either. “I will protect every member of my family,” she said, radiating confidence, “in any way I must. Now leave us immediately.” It sounded like more of a command than a suggestion, so Hanna was happy to obey. He was several yards away before he looked back over his shoulder and realized the officer was not following.  
  
“No, you idiot!” he whined, hardly able to believe the man. He honestly would have forgotten payment entirely if they could get out of there and back home without anyone getting killed, but it seemed the officer was determined to throw his life away for nothing, and it seemed Hanna was determined to witness the man's bloody demise, because he could not for the perhaps-literal life of him convince himself to abandon the officer, though he greatly doubted the wolves would follow if he left then.  
  
“I cannot allow more innocents to be harmed by this family member of yours,” the officer said, his eyes locked on the woman's, unyielding. “I cannot allow them to remain a danger.”  
  
_'Good luck with that,'_ Hanna thought, glancing between the two stubborn individuals, one of which was probably a demon, dangerous at its core.  
  
The woman's hard gaze softened slightly. “I regret what happened last night, but it was an abnormal situation. It will not happen again, but _we_ will be the ones to ensure that, not the city guard.”  
  
Hanna wondered briefly if the officer felt a pang of annoyance at having his career mislabeled, then he thought about the woman's words. They didn't sound like something a demon would say, in his limited experience. It didn't _feel_ like something a demon would say, he decided, relying instead on instinct. Still, demon or not, the woman was definitely dangerous, and he was a bit worried the officer was going to get himself in trouble if he kept going like this, so he tried to get his attention with a _'pssst'_ . The man didn't turn around or indicate he'd heard him at all, but Hanna loudly whispered his new revelation to him: “I don't think they're demons after all, but we should still get out of here!”  
  
“Demons?” the woman asked with a scoff. “Of course we're not demons.” Hanna was momentarily surprised that she'd heard him all the way over there, until he remembered that she probably spent a portion of her time as a wolf, and obviously kept some of her wolvish attributes even in human form. He was impressed, honestly, and just the littlest bit envious.  
  
“I'm not concerned if they're demons,” the officer responded to Hanna without turning his head away from the woman. “I'm concerned that they're dangerous. Even humans can be dangerous.”  
  
That was true, Hanna knew. In this city, that was very true. He was fed and clothed off the danger of the people in this city.  
  
The woman growled in a low rumbling way he'd never heard from a human before, almost betraying her next statement. “I have told you, we are _not_ dangerous under normal circumstances.” She turned to address Hanna then, as if having decided that the officer either wouldn't care or wouldn't understand what she had to say next. “One of our newest members inhaled burning wolfs-bane before we could properly warn him to avoid it. In tandem with the full moon, he became difficult to control.”  
  
“I haven't the slightest clue what that means,” Hanna said, not bothering to raise his voice or close the distance between them.  
  
“Do you not?” The wolf woman seemed confused. “Are you not a witch doctor? I can smell it on you as if you bathed in blood and deathroot.”  
  
Hanna reminded himself not to get testy with the woman; she may not be a demon, but she was still likely capable of ripping his throat out with her claws if she was so compelled. “I'm not a witch,” he said. “And certainly not a witch _doctor._ I specialize in getting information from the dead.”  
  
One of the wolves nearest the woman whined at her and she stared at it for a moment before returning her attention to the magic-user. “You are the one who has been selling those magical trinkets. I have a request for you. Make a charm for me and then I will let you and the guardsman leave in peace.”  
  
It was getting dark and cold; Hanna wanted to have left in peace many minutes ago, when there were no stipulations to their safe release. But making an amulet for the woman, this was something he could do. In all likelihood, anyway. He approached her, coming to stand near the officer, who gave him an unsure look, a questioning expression that seemed to ask, 'Are you sure you want to get more involved?' as if he weren't already ankle-deep in the metaphorical and literal sludge of the city most of his days.  
  
“What do you need?” Hanna asked, though given her descriptions of what caused one of their family to murder several people last night, he had some idea.  
  
The woman turned away from them and headed into the compound. The wolves followed behind her. “Come see my son.”  
  
It was not the most cordial of invitations, but Hanna and the officer did as she asked, following her into the fortress of shacks. They wound through the maze of open-ceiling hallways between each row of patched-together rooms until they came to a large partially covered courtyard in what felt like the middle of the jumble of huts. For an apartment made of scrap on the outskirts of a town mostly made of trash, the courtyard was quite nice. Flat stones were arranged artfully in the soft dirt, which itself was a rarity, and several young trees were growing remarkably well in the middle. Underneath the tallest of them lay two wolves, one of which looked severely under the weather even to Hanna, who was no expert on animals. At the edges of the courtyard were at least a dozen new wolves, which were far more of a concern to Hanna than the sickly-looking one under the tree.  
  
“Why are they staying wolves?” Hanna asked, with a paranoid distaste he hoped wasn't too obvious.  
  
“They feel safer that way,” their leader said. “They may change back when there is not a lawman present.”  
  
Hanna understood entirely. Revealing oneself to someone who could have you arrested was a risk to be avoided, most of the time. He didn't think this particular officer would cause them any problems, but even if he decided to, he'd have a hell of a time convincing his superiors to take a wolf into custody, if they could even tell which one was which.  
  
That little kinship he now felt with the pack was enough to convince himself to turn away from their watchful gazes and focus instead on his... patient. “So this is your son?” he asked as he slowly approached the pair under the tree. The officer stayed at his shoulder; whether to protect him, or for his _own_ sense of security, Hanna wasn't sure. Regardless, he didn't mind the slightly more familiar presence at his back instead of just the prickling of being watched by twenty silent sets of eyes.  
  
“My daughter's mate,” the woman specified. “Her fiance. He was turned recently. He is having a difficult time adjusting and has no control over his form in the wake of the full moon.”  
  
“That's... unfortunate,” he said, leaving off from adding, ' _especially for the people he killed last night'_ . He guessed then that the sort of charm she wanted for them was... something that helped him retain control? He thought about what in his repertoire could be used in such a way.  
  
“Can you help?” It was phrased as a question, but the leader's hard voice made it sound more declarative than inquisitive.  
  
“I'm thinking,” Hanna said. Behind him, he felt the officer tense up at his impolite tone.  
  
The leader seemed to feel that was an acceptable response. “Fine. Please let me know when you're finished.” Then she and a majority of the wolves left the courtyard, retreating into unknown corners of their ramshackle mansion.  
  
Hanna sat cross-legged where he stood, a few yards from the two wolves. The fully-conscious one, presumably the leader's daughter, based on how intertwined her limbs were with the other, watched him calmly. The officer remained standing, having apparently decided to guard Hanna as he worked. Every so often he shuffled around to keep an eye on a different set of wolves.  
  
Now, the magic user's most practiced and popular charm was his deathward. People tended to think that keeping death away meant keeping health near, and if that was the case with this particular charm, he could tweak the health bit to be specific to physical form, or mental control, or whatever it was that was intrinsic to their change. Unfortunately, the deathward charms literally staved off death, that element or entity or what-have-you that took one into the afterlife, by making the wearer unnoticeable or unpleasant, just enough that death would avoid them. If a person were dying of starvation, the charm would not make them any less hungry. If they were dying of old age, it would not make them any less feeble. It only granted time to fix the problem, a short grace period.  
  
In all honesty, Hanna knew selling these charms to his beggar patrons was a little cruel. Most of them were dying of problems they could never fix in the time the wards gave, often diseases they couldn't even identify, let alone cure. It was false hope for those poor souls... but it was _something_ , he supposed.  
  
The wolf-clan, though... Maybe there were ways they could stop their transformation, if they had a little extra time? He could only guess. Or... he could ask.  
  
“Uh... _girl?_ ” he called to the conscious wolf. “Can you explain a few things for me?”  
  
The girl-wolf turned her head from him, looking at him only from the corner of her eye. She seemed to feel like the other wolves, hesitant to reveal herself. But if they wanted a useful charm for their wolfs-bane poisoned packmate, Hanna needed to speak with someone who knew first-hand how their transformations worked, and likely no one was more invested in the problem than the 'patient's fiance.  
  
He shoved lightly at the officer, who was watching the one-sided conversation. “If he promises not to look, will you talk to me?” he asked the wolf.  
  
The officer sighed, not quite a huff because duty came before disappointment, and turned to face the hall where they'd entered the courtyard, initiating a bored stare-down with the wolf most in his line of sight.  
  
After a moment, the girl-wolf transformed back into a girl-human. Even for Hanna, it was hard to describe what exactly had happened; one moment she was an animal, and the next she was a person, and there had been some movement in between, but overall it had the feeling of the melting of a mirage.  
  
“What do you need to know?” the girl asked quietly, not removing herself from the tangle of fur her naked flesh was caught in, for which Hanna was either glad or not glad.  
  
He cleared his throat and tried to remember his hole-filled theories. “You transform because of, uh, the moon?” She nodded. “Then without the moon can you not transform?”  
  
“No,” she told him. Her tone was airy. “We can transform any time. The moon makes it easier.”  
  
“Does being in moonlight make it hard _not_ to change?”  
  
The girl then looked at him as if he were, like every other human probably, exceedingly stupid. “It's not moon _light_ ,” she told him. “It is the _phases_ of the moon. The fullness. It does not matter whether or not we can see it.”  
  
For the first time in some while, Hanna felt a little humbled, or more, embarrassed, as if he were one of the ignorant masses. Moonlight was different from moon phases? At once the information was both obvious and novel, and he resolved to study the skies as soon as he could.  
  
So then it was the shape of the moon which gave strength to their ability to change, but not what caused it. Nothing _caused_ it, according to the girl, just their decision to transform. Unless, like this sick one, outside forces were... unfairly influencing the part that made the decision. Then perhaps it was their own self they needed protection from until they could gather the willpower to resist the impulse to change.  
  
Honestly, Hanna was fairly certain none of that would make any sense to the wolves, who probably had their own very organic way of understanding, but it was what he had to work with. “I think I've got an idea,” he said to nobody in particular. The girl looked like she wasn't expecting much, and the officer remained respectfully where he was. Hanna rummaged through his pockets and pulled out a dry bone a little smaller than one of his fingers, removed what marrow was left, then filled it with one of his powders. “You may not like this, but I need some of his blood.”  
  
The wolf-girl did _not_ seem to like it, but she nodded him over. Hanna approached with steps as sure as he could manage and knelt down near the two of them. The girl grabbed her mate's paw and made a small slice on the underside with a fingernail that had become sharp while Hanna hadn't been looking. She held it up and Hanna scraped the gentle beads of blood with the edge of the bone until they dripped down and soaked into the powder. As soon as he had what he needed, he retreated to his place near the officer, who had not turned to look but seemed to be listening carefully for any quiet sign of trouble. He sorted again through his pockets and found several small coils of ropes. Briefly he considered asking for some wolf fur to weave thread out of, but decided that would ultimately be too awkward and cost too much time, aside from the fact that he didn't know the first thing about weaving. He opted for a fine straw rope for now, eschewing leather or any other animal-based ropes. It was bad enough he had to use a cow bone instead of human or wolf or at least dog. Hopefully the spell would not be confused by the presence of another creature and try to protect them from their inner cattle.  
  
Carefully but quickly, because the light was nearly gone and he had been awake for far longer than usual by this point, Hanna wrapped the bone in the cord, tying a complex knot on each side and stringing the rest of it into a long loop at one end. “This should do,” he said, injecting the statement with a confidence he only half felt. He had never done a charm like this before, but it was built off theories from things he had done thousands of times.  
  
“Let's see,” the girl said, finally extricating herself from her fiance, much to Hanna's wide eyes and heated cheeks. The wolf-people may not be demons, but they certainly seemed to share their distaste for propriety. The girl took the charm from his somewhat limp grasp and returned to loop it around the sick wolf's neck. Nothing happened immediately, or in the several long seconds they all held their breath, but as the metaphorical hackles began to raise on the girl, in preparation for the raising of the literal ones, the leader reappeared and simply held a hand up at her. She calmed quickly and sat back down in her mate's nest of fur.  
  
“Thank you, Mr. Cross,” she said. “I can already sense the difference. I'm confident that my son will be able to make a full recovery now. With this, he should be able to retain control and pose no more threat to the people of the city. Will that do, Mister guardsman?”  
  
The officer finally turned back around, though he kept his eyes locked on the leader, not straying an inch toward the girl, who was still human, still nude, and still glaring... if less viciously now that her mother could vouch for Hanna's workmanship.  
  
“I'm afraid not,” he replied. “I trust your judgment on the matter of your son's safety, but he still must be brought to justice.”  
  
“Must he?” The leader again gave the officer the condescending look of someone who knew they were going to win both the battle and the war. “What will you tell the public? Will you tell them that there are men who change at will into violent beasts? Will you be responsible for the panic? Or will you let them take you to the asylum in the name of a truth the people do not want?”  
  
A long moment passed as the officer did not respond, before he turned around again and nodded in defeat.  
  
Pleased with the outcome, the woman bowed her head to Hanna and thanked him again. “I would like to request several dozen more of these, when you have the time. But for now, you should take the guardsman and return to the city.”  
  
“More than happy to,” Hanna said, returning the half bow before grabbing the officer by the arm and retreating back the way they came, walking with a speed fueled by relief and a desire for home. He didn't slow or let go of the man until they'd left the worst of the slums, and even then he was hesitant to release the officer's sleeve, as he found himself suddenly overcome with a predictable amount of fatigue. Eventually he decided not to, just to have an anchor to the waking world.  
  
The officer looked down at him as they walked but didn't try to remove Hanna from his arm. He seemed conflicted, but still he said, “Thank you for your help, Mr. Cross.”  
  
“Eh, call me Hanna,” the magic-user all but slurred, most of his concentration on keeping one foot in front of the other.  
  
“Thank you, Hanna.”  
  
Hanna didn't respond, and the rest of the journey to his apartment was quiet but for their steps, two steady, two stumbling and dragging on the occasion, and the faint noises of the evening in the city. Without the hat, which they'd dropped back in the wolves' block and quite forgotten about, they moved much faster, but it was still an indeterminate amount of time to Hanna's tired mind. They did finally arrive in front of his building, and he let go of the officer's sleeve in order to turn and face him.  
  
“Well.” He looked up at the man, and realized how tall he was. He didn't realize he himself was slouching considerably, which would not change the assessment of the man's height, simply the degree. “Well. It was a pleasure working with you, Officer--, uh...” He realized he hadn't actually caught the man's name earlier.  
  
“Detective, actually,” the man responded, and Hanna wanted to laugh, so he did.  
  
“Then, it was a pleasure working with you, “Detective”,” he said, slowly heading for the front steps. “Maybe there'll be another gruesome murder some day and we can do it again.”  
  
“Can you make it up on your own?” the detective asked, concerned but a bit amused.  
  
Hanna waved dismissively. “I'm a _necromancer_ .”  
  
Likely the detective didn't know what that had to do with Hanna's ability to get up stairs, as Hanna himself did not know, but he did not press the subject. “Sleep well--,” he said, “--Hanna.”  
  
“Sleep well, Officer Detective,” Hanna responded as he was entering the building. He didn't remember getting up the stairs or entering his apartment or greeting his cats or falling into his wonderful bed, but he remembered waking up laughing about “Officer Detective”, and then falling back to sleep again.  
  
When he woke next, it was in full daylight. Sith and Sabo were curled up with him, one at his feet and one on his pillow, and there was a knocking at the door.  
  
“Mr. Cross?” It was the officer. Rather, the detective. He didn't sound as if he was in a hurry, but Hanna had had enough rest not be feeling antagonistic toward the man, so he removed himself from bed instead of letting the detective wait for another few minutes. Besides, he had, perhaps inexplicably, come to at least tolerate the man in the last day. He was not quite ready to admit that he might _like_ him, despite how polite, competent, and non-judgmental he had been.  
  
He went to the door, only a little conscious of the fact that he had been wearing the same clothes for three days now and hadn't done a thing with his hair. When he opened it, the detective smiled down at him, looking quite refreshed himself.  
  
“Good morning, Mr. Cross,” he said.  
  
“I didn't expect to see you again this soon,” Hanna said, yawning. “Has there been another murder already?”  
  
The detective shook his head. “No, not that I'm aware of. I returned so that we could discuss payment for your assistance yesterday.”  
  
In the wake of such an exhausting day and such a good night's sleep, Hanna had almost completely forgotten about payment. “Oh. Right.” He straightened out his clothes a little. “How much is the force offering? I'll take anything I can get from them.”  
  
“Actually...” The detective sniffed. The air was cold this morning, even though the sun was bright. “They aren't offering anything. I didn't receive permission to bring you on, so your fee will have to come from my paycheck. What do I owe you?”  
  
_'Oh,'_ Hanna thought. That was unfortunate. “Cheap bastards,” he said. “How about half yesterday's wage then?”  
  
The detective nodded, but his response was not in line with what Hanna usually took a nod to mean. “I'm paid on commission. And they haven't decided whether to accept my report.”  
  
“What did you tell them?” Hanna asked, remembering the somewhat inconclusive end to their investigation the previous evening.  
  
“A rabid wolf,” the detective answered with a dissatisfied shrug. “I told them I took care of it, but I'm not sure they'll be convinced.”  
  
Hanna frowned, commiserating with the detective over his miserly employers. He really disliked working for the police. “So you might not get paid at all.”  
  
“That's right,” the detective said, looking apologetic and a little embarrassed. “But I still intend to pay you. You were a great help.”  
  
Regardless of his own personal rules about working for free, Hanna could not in good conscience take the detective's money, especially as he realized the man was not wearing an officer's uniform and hadn't been yesterday, presumably because the force was too cheap to provide for free-lancers. He might in fact be poorer than Hanna himself and, _yes_ , he took money from beggars on a regular basis, but...  
  
“I'm out of bread,” he mentioned. “Buy me breakfast and we can call it even.”  
  
The detective looked frustrated for just a split second, but he recognized that Hanna was breaking his own rules to be this generous, and maybe he thought about how little he had saved at home, little enough to put aside pride and stubbornness for the morning at least. “It's a deal.”  
  
“Great!” Hanna said. He really was quite hungry. “Let me-- give me a minute.” He dashed back inside and changed shirts, tossing the old one into a pile occupied by Sith and a week's worth of clothing he hadn't gotten around to scrubbing. He closed the door behind him and headed out into the sunlight with the detective, glad for once that there wasn't a death to be dealt with.  
  
They strolled through the morning light down the street until they'd picked out enough food from roadside vendors to satisfy their appetites and the mostly-forgotten debt, then returned to Hanna's apartment to feast upon it. Sith and Sabo introduced themselves straight away and made themselves quickly familiar with the man's lap. The humans chatted about Hanna's apothecary shelves, and wolf-people, and the idiots over at the precinct, and cats, and Hanna's glasses, and the city, and eventually the detective excused himself to go back to whatever it was he did during the day when not solving murders, and Hanna spent the rest of the day making amulets and wondering if he'd see the man again. The cats spent the rest of the day whining.  
  
Hanna did indeed see the man again, a week later, on a stormy day when a politician's young daughter had gone missing. The two of them returned to the apartment later that evening, covered in mud but having returned the girl to her family. They shared a pie the girl's mother had baked while waiting fretfully and tearfully given to them upon her daughter's return.  
  
Some days later, Hanna was again called upon to help the detective solve the case of a mangled corpse thought to belong to a clergyman. They spent the evening laughing about the priest's clever plan to pass a body from the morgue off as his own in order to escape a lifestyle he'd never been committed to and elope with his paramour out to the west. They dined on whatever Hanna had sitting around in his cupboard, since the detective couldn't bring himself to rat out the ex-priest and therefore would not be getting paid.  
  
The detective returned the next week because he wanted advice on securing his own apartment with a rune like Hanna used, and several days later because he had extra vegetables that were going to go bad if he didn't share, and the week after that simply because he'd been in the area and wanted to say hello, and a short while later because he actually did have a case, which he was capable of handling on his own if he _wanted_ to and if he hadn't already become somewhat accustomed to working with a partner.  
  
And the week after that, and the day after _that_ , and several days later, and twice the following week, and several times the next, they found themselves coming to each other for some reason or another, even if it was only _'my cats want to see you, so please come by whenever you're free so they'll stop whining',_ and it was different from being surrounded only by death, but Hanna did not mind. Before long he minded when there were too many days between those in which they met, but whether by providence or because the detective felt similarly, there was rarely a week during which they did not see each other, and Hanna was pleased to have at least one thing beside death that he felt he could rely on.  
  
xXxXx


	5. Chapter 5

He woke to a smell. It was a good smell, which was sort of really surprising, because the sorts of smells he was used to smelling from his apartment ranged from the mildly unpleasant to the noxious, depending on what sort of vagrant was occupying any of the adjacent rooms these days. But this was a  _ very _ good smell, a fresh food type smell.   
  
With a comfortable yawn, Hanna pulled the tangled sheets away from him and made his way to the kitchen, where he found his partner working at the stove, which he first found strange, and then thought of as normal, and then found strange again in quick succession.   
  
“Hey, morning, uh, Wilhelm,” Hanna said, breathing deeply to inhale as much of the delicious scent as possible. “What're you making?”   
  
“Pancakes,” Wilhelm said, holding up a box of Krusteaz with one hand as he concentrated on the flat cake baking in the frying pan... which probably still had a rune scribbled on the back of it from the night before last.   
  
“Cool, I love pancakes.” He especially liked the kind with the cheap sugary dried blueberry bits in them. These looked like plain buttermilk from the box, but he wasn't about to be picky about food he didn't have to make himself. Although he didn't recall  _ having _ any pancake mix in his cupboards recently. He didn't have... like, anything in there, as far as he was aware, except a few spell ingredients and maybe some  _ really _ stale Cap'n Crunch. “Where did you-- uh, where did you find pancake mix?” 

Wilhelm flipped the pancake carefully and watched it sizzle for a moment before taking his eyes off it and responding. “I asked your land-lady.” His eyebrows quirked up in amusement as Hanna made a face. “Don't worry,” he added. “The box was sealed.”   
  
Hanna laughed. “Nah, I wasn't worried about that. I mean, not really. Not until you mentioned it anyway. I was just imagining talking to Mrs. Blaney like... on purpose, when it wasn't absolutely necessary.”   
  
“You need to eat.”   
  
He was going to argue that he didn't technically  _ need _ to eat, but the last thing he'd had was some left-over chow mein two days ago. “They do smell pretty amazing,” Hanna said, sliding closer to watch as Wilhelm put the cake on the top of a small stack and handed the plate to Hanna. “Wow, thanks.” The cakes were hot, but heavenly so. He pulled the bottom one out from under the others and rolled it up into a taco shape, then shoved it in his mouth. It was delightful.   
  
“Are they good?” the zombie asked, apparently not quite sure if Hanna's groans were of pleasure or pain.   
  
“Mm-hmm,” Hanna hummed, swallowing the large mouthful and thinking he probably ought to get a drink. He poured himself a quick glass of water and regretted never buying milk. (It was just too mortal of a drink, unfortunately; time usually passed so erratically for him that he completely forgot about it before it went bad, and if he wanted soggy cheese he'd splurge and buy some feta.)   
  
“Good,” Wilhelm said with a short nod before returning to his well-contained little mess at the stove and beginning to clean it up. “I didn't recall how to cook them, so I followed the instructions on the box.”   
  
“Hey, you did a lot better than I usually do,” Hanna said, taking a bite out of another pancake. He'd never been great at cooking, he'd admit, even when he'd had to eat on a regular basis. Some of the best meals of his adult life had been the ones Wilhelm had made. Not that they were gourmet or anything, the man just seemed able to follow recipes better than him. (Hanna assumed all of his own recipe-following skill was devoted to spell making, which was okay, since that was just about his only way of earning money.) He wondered if he encouraged him if the zombie might actually transcend his previous culinary talent, despite the inability to taste.  
  
Hanna finished his meal in almost record speed and offered to help with the clean up, but Wilhelm wasn't having it.   
  
“Seriously, you don't have to do that,” Hanna said, hovering as his companion piled the pan, spatula, and mixing bowl into the sink and let the hot water run over them. “And you didn't have to make me breakfast either. I mean, not that I don't appreciate it, 'cuz I do. Hey, look, at least let me do the water part-- You probably don't wanna get wet if you can avoid it!”   
  
Wilhelm looked down at his hands, one on the faucet knob and the other reaching for the slightly-rusty steel wool. He paused and really stared at them for a minute and Hanna could imagine the path the man's eyes were taking over the dry skin, following some little scars that decorated the backs of them. “I guess you're right.” He nudged the knob into the off position and drew back from the sink, turning to Hanna instead. He looked like Hanna could remember feeling back when he was a kid and he first realized just how bad his vision was, frustrated and sad about the stupid limitations of his body. Of course he'd learned to live with it, and he eventually got glasses, and it hadn't affected his life that much in the grand scheme of things, but that initial moment of coming to terms with it had felt like falling or sinking, and it was a feeling he'd never quite forget.   
  
Hanna wasn't going to do dishes right now, but he swore he'd do them later, if only so his companion didn't renege on his decision not to.  _ Now  _ they were going to go to Worth's place and do that damn reaper summoning ritual so Wilhelm could stop  _ looking like that _ , at least for a while. Hanna didn't like the man's introspective expression; it looked too much like it had last night.   
  
“Clean-up can wait!” Hanna said, mustering some enthusiasm. “We've got more important things to do! You ready?”   
  
“You want to go this early?”   
  
No, really Hanna didn't want to go at all. But they needed to have some sort of progress in this 'case' or he knew Wilhelm was gonna get antsy and that wouldn't work. So he'd summon the reaper and get it to tell him just enough that Hanna could write it off as something he was gonna have to spend some time on. Like, weeks or maybe even months if he could get away with it. That should be long enough to come up with a more plausible excuse for not having a good answer for his zombie friend.   
  
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Worth might not be up, but that's okay. I know where Lamont leaves his deliveries. Worth won't mind.”   
  
So they left the dishes for another time and headed out. It was fairly early, and the cold clear air smelled fresh (as much as it could this far into the city), and Hanna still didn't like where today could go if things went wrong or the reaper wanted to be a secret-spilling piece of crap, but he felt invigorated, confident that he could pull off this spell with few problems and probably handle whatever else life threw at him. He looked back over his shoulder at Wilhelm, who seemed content to follow along, hands (you guessed it) in his pockets. It was a shame, a hollow gnawing shame, that Hanna couldn't talk to the man about what was going on like he'd always used to. He hated being this quiet, and yeah, he had gotten used to all the internal monologuing over the lonely years, but it was only ever tolerable because there was no one to talk  _ to. _   
  
Maybe some small talk. That couldn't get him in too much trouble. “This weather's pretty nice,” he said. “Sort of reminds me of where I grew up.” ...Well, no, okay, that wasn't very good small talk, especially if he was trying to avoid sensitive information.   
  
“Where was that?”   
  
“Out in the country somewhere,” Hanna responded vaguely. It had been country at the time, anyway. These days it was probably at least a sprawling suburb, but he hadn't been back in ages, not since someone cared enough to suggest he visit his parents. He wondered if the church was still there, or if they'd built houses or strip-malls over the graves and where the fields had been.   
  
Wilhelm hummed, maybe imagining the wheat waving gently in the breeze. Or maybe he was imagining corn. “What made you move to the city?”   
  
_ 'A demon,' _ Hanna almost joked. (Not that it was exactly a joke.) “Better business opportunities,” he said. “Not much use for, uh, my kind of magic in the country.”   
  
“You have many kinds of magics,” the man said. “Don't you?” He pulled his coat closer around him when a jogger gave him a too-long look as she passed.   
  
“Not back then. I didn't learn most of those until I came to the city.”   
  
“Hmm.”   
  
The conversation died a gentle death and was replaced by a casual silence as they made their way to Worth's alley. It smelled a little worse in this particular part of town, so Hanna quickened his pace a bit. Honestly, what made it smell like that? He thought it might be the sewer. Modern sewage systems were loads better than what he used to be accustomed to, but they still weren't pleasant by a long shot.   
  
“Smells familiar,” Wilhelm mentioned.   
  
“Bleh. So you're from the city then.” That was an easy enough detail to guess about the zombie's life based on the way he walked down streets and avoided looking at strangers too long, so Hanna didn't bother trying to keep it a secret.   
  
“I think so,” he said, nodding.   
  
They came to Worth's door soon after that and let themselves in. The door wasn't locked, not that they'd been expecting it to be, but what was surprising was that the office wasn't empty. Of all people, it was Conrad Achenleck they found sitting at Worth's desk, reading a book but looking like he wasn't enjoying it. When he raised his head, he looked like he wasn't enjoying the sight of them either.   
  
“I was going to say 'Thank god, normal people', but it's you.” He scowled in Hanna's direction and the magic-user laughed at the vampire's ability to hold a grudge.   
  
“Nice to see you too, Conrad,” Hanna responded cheerily. “What're you doing hangin' around Worth's place? And where is he? Still sleeping, I guess?”   
  
Conrad scoffed, but Hanna could see he was glad to have someone to complain to. “Still passed out is more like it. I'm  _ here _ because they wouldn't fucking let me go  _ home _ . I just came for some food and then they were all  _ drunk  _ and  _ pushy _ and by the time I could get them off me it was daylight. And now  _ you're _ here, and I'm stuck until sundown.”   
  
Hanna raised a skeptical eyebrow and a corresponding corner of his lips. (He'd bet that behind him Wilhelm was doing the same, maybe minus the mouth.) “I know Worth is weird when he's drunk, but he's not  _ that _ strong. And aren't vampires supposed to be pretty powerful?”   
  
“Shut up,” Conrad grouched. “It was two against one. And what the hell are you here for anyway?”   
  
Although he could probably have a good few minutes of fun poking at Conrad and the holes in his excuse (seriously, even Worth  _ and  _ (presumably) Lamont wouldn't be enough to hold down a vampire, even if they were both piled on top of him. Which, no, he didn't really need to think about that.), he let the poor guy off the hook and gave him a straight answer. “Worth was supposed to get the ingredients I need to summon a reaper.”   
  
“Oh yeah, he mentioned that,” Conrad mumbled, avoiding looking quite in Hanna's direction. “I told him I'd give you some of my blood.”   
  
“That's generous,” Hanna said. “Thanks.” Honestly, he was a little surprised. He wondered what would inspire the vampire to do such a thing, when he simply didn't seem like the kind of person who liked interacting with others at all, let alone helping them.   
  
Conrad made a face like something had crawled up his nose and died. (It was true, he could probably smell the both of them, but Hanna didn't think  _ smells  _ could really bother him anymore, after living in the city for fifty-plus years.) “Shut the hell up. I owed him a favor. It's not like I like... any of you.” He gave Wilhelm a distrusting sidelong glance.   
  
“Hey, whatever works,” Hanna said with a shrug. He doubted Conrad  _ totally  _ hated Worth if he bothered coming around even occasionally, but he wasn't going to provoke him about it. There were still those other ingredients to find, so he went down the hall and let himself into the 'operation' room, hoping Worth and Lamont hadn't chosen to pass out in  _ there. _ He'd need one of them for the other blood eventually, but there was mixing he could do while he gave them a little time to wake up and sober up. (He hoped alcohol content didn't influence the usability of the blood, or summon an alcoholic reaper or something.)   
  
On top of the flat wide table in the middle of the room sat a styrofoam container, which was empty except for some mostly-melted ice. Some damp towels were strewn about the surface, a few having fallen to the floor. Hanna checked under the table and found a smaller cardboard box, which looked like it had been kicked there haphazardly. Or drunkenly. It held an assortment of dry yellowed bones, exactly what he'd been looking for. He would have to make sure to thank Lamont whenever he woke up; the man was amazingly apt at finding just what was needed.   
  
Grabbing a plastic bowl from a cabinet and a heavy glass ball thing that looked like a paperweight, Hanna returned to the front office to grind up the powder.   
  
“So you don't remember anything?” Conrad was saying to Wilhelm, who had sat in the chair by the door he'd claimed last time.   
  
“Not very much.”   
  
Hanna didn't join in on the conversation, instead opting to listen quietly as he sat crosslegged on the floor and began crunching the bones. The zombie remembered something? “Not very much” was, of course, not much, but it was something, and anything could be dangerous.   
  
“What  _ do _ you remember?” Conrad asked. He had his head propped up in his right hand, looking actually fairly attentive to Wilhelm's story.   
  
“I'm not sure,” the zombie said, thinking, analyzing. “They're more feelings than memories. Colors. I think... grey. And red.”   
  
“Blood? You obviously died. Maybe it was murder.” Hanna shot a ' _ cease and desist _ ' look in Conrad's direction, but the vampire didn't notice his disapproval. “What else?”   
  
“...I don't know.” He turned to Hanna, but said nothing, asked nothing.   
  
Conrad turned to Hanna as well. “So you're, what are you doing? You're gonna summon a reaper and have it tell you what happened to this guy?”   
  
“Something like that, yeah.” Hanna wished he had a mortar and pestle, but the powder was coming along well enough. He was gonna have to wake up Worth soon, or hope he was dead-asleep enough not to notice having blood drawn from him. And it would probably be prudent to draw Worth's blood first, just so they didn't risk infecting him with vampirism. ...Or maybe just pretend anyone around here actually knew any sort of medical safety and use separate needles. (And as for turning someone into a vampire, would it work if they were alive and totally healthy? Even through direct injection? Hanna had forgotten, if he'd ever known. He'd never bothered getting really familiar with a lot of the specific rules of the supernatural world that didn't apply to him and his chosen profession.)   
  
When the brittle bones had been ground into a fine dust, Hanna stood and went in search of a few syringes. He knew Worth had plenty of them, and though the man's storage system didn't make much sense to him, they weren't hard to find. As he was about to head down the hallway towards the doctor's bedroom, his imagination presented him with a quick warning image, so he backtracked to the front office.   
  
“Hey, uh. When you saw Worth last, was he, y'know, 'decent'?”   
  
Conrad scoffed. “What,  _ Worth _ ? Hell no. But he had clothes on, if that's what you're asking.”   
  
“Good, great,” Hanna said, relieved. He was halfway down the hall before he ran back to poke his head into the office again and ask, just to make sure, “Lamont too?”   
  
“Last I checked,” Conrad said, nose doing the grossed-out twitch again which, combined with the tilt of his eyebrows, made him look very disinterested in providing any sort of proof for the statement.   
  
That was good enough for Hanna, and probably all he was going to get, so he jogged back down the hallway, syringe in hand, and was a half-second away from braving the unknown depths of Worth's bedroom when the man in question stumbled out of it and nearly impaled himself on the needle point. As it was, it just caught on his t-shirt a little.   
  
Worth squinted down at him. “Hannuh? Ugh, move it, kid. I gotta take a piss.” He shoved Hanna out of the way, softly but with the roughness of a hangover.   
  
“Yeah, good morning,” Hanna yelled after him, pleased the man was wearing pants as he shuffled down the hall. In a moment of ill-advised curiosity, Hanna peeked into Worth's room to see if it was as trashed as it should be, based on Conrad's complaints. It looked about the same as usual: dark and in mild disarray. The only difference was Lamont, who was laying in a sort of crumpled heap on the floor  _ next _ to the bed.   
  
“Morning, 'Mont!” Hanna called gently.   
  
Lamont groaned, then yawned and turned his head towards the door, grimacing at the light filtering down from the front of the hall. “Hey Hanna,” he rasped. “Y'get those bones?”   
  
“Yup. They were perfect, thanks.” He gave a thumbs up, in case Lamont's head was pounding too hard to hear him.   
  
“Good, good,” Lamont whispered, probably thinking he was responding at full volume. He put his head back down and closed his eyes, so Hanna backed out of the room and shut the door softly. Then he concluded that Conrad was just being dramatic; if both Worth and Lamont were conscious enough to make any sort of conversation,  _ and _ they were both wearing clothes, they couldn't have been  _ all _ that drunk. He thought maybe 'the vampire doth protest too much'.   
  
He waited another minute for Worth to come out and intercepted him before he could slither back into his dark cave and sleep the day away. With a cheesy smile, he held up the syringe.   
  
“Yer doin' that today, hnn? I was hopin' to get another coupla hours b'fore dealin' with any weird bullshit.”   
  
“You can go back to sleep,” Hanna told him. “I just need the blood first.”   
  
Worth shook his head and reached instinctively for his cigarettes, which were probably in the pocket of his coat, wherever that had ended up. “Uhn-uh, if yer usin' my blood, I'm sure as hell gonna be there t' make sure nothin' gets outta hand. I don't trust black magic further 'n I can throw Lamont's fat ass.”   
  
“Fuck you,” Lamont yelled quietly from the dark room.   
  
Hanna chuckled and waved a hand at Worth. “Alright, that's fair, I guess. Come on then.” He headed back to the office, Worth following after a quick detour to find his coat and light a cigarette.   
  
“Outta my spot, Connie,” he told the vampire, with perhaps less vitriol than usual.   
  
Looking like a petulant child, Conrad slowly removed himself from the chair and went to stand a few feet away with his arms crossed over his chest as Worth fell heavily into the vacated space. “Thanks for waking him up,  _ Hanna,” _ Conrad said, throwing his name in there like he'd prefer to slap the kid around a little if it didn't mean he'd have to actually touch him.   
  
Hanna ignored his pissy accusations. “'Connie', huh? That's  _ cute. _ ”   
  
“ _ Do not _ call me that.” He sighed angrily, a breath that was more of a growl, and turned to stare at the zombie. “I'm not gonna survive the two of them in the same room. How do you deal with it?” he asked, probably assuming the man had been hanging around Hanna far longer than he  _ had _ . ...Consecutively.   
  
Wilhelm simply shrugged and gave a small amused smile.   
  
By then, Hanna had drawn Worth's blood and came over with the second syringe to get Conrad's. (It was good he decided to use two; he needed more than would fit in one. He had to make enough paint for a person-sized circle, after all, and the extra rules he wouldn't normally bother writing in if he were doing this in private.) After that, he settled down again to mix the two into the bone powder, leaving the others to go about their business for a while, which was mostly a casual bickering between the two- ...well, no, Conrad wasn't mortal (it was sometimes hard to remember that about vampires, compared to ghosts or zombies or whatever, since they were so relatively normal-looking). The two non-zombies, anyway. Wilhelm sat where he'd been all morning, browsing through the severely out-dated magazines stacked messily on the corner table.  
  
A few minutes after the mixing was finished, when the first circle was half-done being finger-painted on the scuffed up floor of the office (“Jeezus, Hanna, ain't you gonna put down some newspaper or somethin'?” Worth asked, a bit alarmed. “I didn't fuckin' ask fer a new floor decoration.” to which Hanna responded, “It'll burn up when we're done, don't worry!”), Lamont wandered in to say hello.   
  
“This looks fun,” he said, still a little groggy. “And this must be Hanna's friend. How ya doin'?” He waved, and Wilhelm waved back. “Well, as exciting as this looks, I don't think I've had enough Z's to be dealing with, what'd you say? Reapers? Yeah, not today.” (Worth grunted in agreement.) He thumbed back over his shoulder into the darkness of the hall and started to leave before Hanna stopped him.   
  
“Wait. Can you take Wilhelm? I mean, not to  _ sleep,  _ obviously. He just shouldn't be here when I call the reaper at first, 'cuz they're... unpredictable. About the dead.”   
  
“Unpredictable?” Conrad asked, worried. “What, like violent?”   
  
Hanna shook his head. “You're fine, Connie,” he said, and the concern melted from Conrad's stiff shoulders, replaced with an easily-triggered indignation.   
  
“Sure,” Lamont said, stifling a yawn. “We can trade embarrassing Hanna stories.”   
  
“Please don't.”   
  
Lamont smiled sleepily and turned to lead the way for the zombie. “Okay, Hanna,” he said, not bothering to sound sincere. Wilhelm stood and followed after him, careful to step  _ around _ the blood-paint circle on the floor.   
  
“I'll call you in when it's safe,” Hanna said to him with a quick toothy smile before returning to his painting.   
  
“Alright,” Wilhelm said softly. His shoulders sat at a low angle, and he looked a little unsure about leaving Hanna in what might be a dangerous situation, but he did as asked and retreated with Lamont into the dark back rooms.   
  
In all honesty, Hanna didn't like having to make him go, but it was a small sacrifice, a short parting so that they might never have to part again. He continued smearing the paint on the floor in increasingly elaborate designs, as quick as he could without missing any details. Once he'd heard what the reaper knew, and filtered the information appropriately before telling his friend, he could figure out what to do about them long-term. If it was another necromancer who'd brought the zombie back, they'd deal with them. If it was--...   
  
Hanna didn't want to think about it too much before the time came.   
  
After a short while, the circle was done, all the necessary runes and patterns built into the edges, and a few extra to protect his secrets. Now all he needed was time. Not  _ time  _ time, but a... a representation of time, a symbol. Like they did with life and death, reapers existed outside of time, and were attracted to it. They respected it. A time-keeping device would work well, like a watch or a clock. A sun-dial would be okay, but since it wouldn't work here Hanna would have to make up for its ineffective power with a stronger magic, which he didn't want to try. He wanted this to work  _ perfectly, _ not be experimental. Nobody really kept sun-dials around these days anyway, so it was a moot point. ...Now, an hourglass would be ideal. Because the time ran out on its own, he wouldn't have to destroy it to end the spell, and the reaper would feel compelled to stay as long as there was sand flowing.   
  
“You wouldn't  _ happen _ to have an hourglass, would you?” Hanna asked Worth, who gave him his patented  _ 'what are you, a dumbass?'  _ look.   
  
“Who the hell keeps  _ hourglasses _ these days?” Hanna sort of nodded sideways in resigned agreement, although in his defense hourglasses had to be at least more common in 21 st century households (or doctor's offices) than sun-dials. Worth's expression changed as Hanna was half-way to making a different suggestion. “Actul'ly, I might have one.”   
  
The doctor pushed himself up out of his terrible slouch at his desk and stalked into the back, rummaging around loudly before he returned with an honest-to-goodness hourglass.   
  
“Here,” Worth said, shoving it into Hanna's hands and slinking back over to his desk.   
  
It was nice, much fancier than what Hanna had come to expect from anything in Worth's possession (although Worth was, in his own way, a collector of the odd and rare-- just that most of his collections were of the grotesque and perishable sort-- so maybe he shouldn't have been too surprised). The tapered glass cylinder was thick, clear, and quite large. A proper hour's worth of clean white sand sat in the bottom half. The bases and pillars were black metal, wrought-iron twisted artfully into spirals. The duality of the black iron and white sand was more than he could have hoped for.   
  
“Thanks,” Hanna said, almost a whisper as he turned his focus back to his circle. He took a deep breath and tried to clear his mind. It didn't exactly work; meditating was never his strong suit, given how long he'd lived, how much he'd seen, but he managed to shove most of his distracting thoughts back a bit. He turned the hourglass and set it down in a little gap between the inner and outer circles, set his hands on the outside of the lines, fingertips just touching the drying blood paint, and spoke aloud the incantation he'd had running on repeat through his head all morning.   
  
The paint lines sizzled, not quite sparking, and Hanna felt a thrum of power through his chest and down his arms, a jolt in his palms and fingers like someone from below had stabbed needles up through the floorboards to trap him there. Before he could even tell himself not to pull away, the pain calmed, the sizzling stilled to a light smoking, and a figure sat in the middle of the circle... cursing.   
  
“Oww. What the  _ fuck? _ ”   
  
Hanna didn't like being judgmental, and he tried to avoid stereotypes, and he knew that things weren't always what they seemed. He was living (sort of) proof that you couldn't always judge a book by its cover. But...   
  
“Who the hell are you? And where the fuck am I?”   
  
The... the  _ person _ sitting in an uncomfortable sprawl on the floor of Worth's office looked like no reaper Hanna had ever met, and he'd met a good few. They all sort of had their similarities. Although they were technically immortal beings who were probably never living humans to begin with (but this was just an assumption on Hanna's part; he had never asked), the reapers he'd met tended to look like fairly normal men, older, but at the same time ageless. Calm, but at the same time dangerous. This one, yeah, not so much. He looked distinctly young, and distinctly pissed off. Hanna guessed maybe they were adjusting to the modern world with a new look?   
  
What was really weird though was a reaper asking a question like that. Very, very weird.   
  
“You don't know?” Hanna asked uneasily.   
  
“Of course I don't fucking know!” the young man yelled, showing off a mouth full of unusually sharp teeth. “I wouldn't ask if I knew!” He flailed somewhat in his anger, and glared murderously at the empty spot in the air his hand had bounced back from. “What the fuck?!”   
  
“So... uh...” Slowly, Hanna stood and stepped back a foot or two. (Not that he was worried the ...reaper(?) was going to break the barrier; he was stuck in the circle until the sand ran out or Hanna disrupted the spell.) He glanced back over his shoulder and saw that Worth and Conrad were both standing, looking a little alarmed and potentially ready to bolt if necessary. “So, are you, um, a reaper?”   
  
The young man gathered himself from how he'd apparently fallen, straightening out his blue hoodie and sitting cross-legged, hands on his thighs with his elbows jutting out. “What?! No I'm not a fucking reaper!” He sighed angrily. “God damn it, this is some weird shit. I've got a test tomorrow that's worth like half my grade, so what the hell do you want?”

Hanna was seriously unsure of what was going on. “I was trying to get ahold of a reaper. Any idea why we got you instead?”   
  
“Probably because I'm working for one,” the young man said, looking a little disgusted at the situation.   
  
“Er, then can you call them?” Hanna asked.   
  
“Pfft. And get him trapped too? Then who the hell is gonna get me out of here?”   
  
Hanna sighed and stared at the shark-toothed kid. Who ever heard of a reaper with an... an underling? He always thought of them as solitary creatures. “I'll let you go as soon as I get to talk to a reaper,” he said.  
  
“Nah man, I don't think so,” the kid said, settling back on his palms and giving Hanna a bored look.   
  
Conrad spoke up from the back of the room, where he was standing with his arms crossed, much closer to Worth than Hanna thought he otherwise might stand. “So, what? You're just gonna sit there until your boss comes to check on you? Does he even know where you are?”   
  
“Eh, he'll find me eventually. Probably when you least expect it,” the reaper's assistant said, grinning with a hint of viciousness that suggested he thought his boss was going to get violent with them, or at least wanted them to think so.   
  
Hanna wasn't worried about that; he knew reapers never killed. They only collected and manipulated souls once they were already dead. They were pretty peaceful, actually. But he was a little worried that this kid's boss wouldn't come before the sand ran out, and the kid would realize he was free to go after the sand stopped flowing. Sure, he could probably get some more bones and do the stupid ritual again in a few days, but what if the same thing happened then?! Why the hell were reapers taking assistants?! Maybe it was to protect them from being summoned like this. It was annoying, but smart.   
  
“I swear we're not planning on doing anything weird,” Hanna said, trying to seem totally composed and really  _ adult, _ because this teenager was being a condescending little shit. “I just need to talk.”   
  
“Fine. Talk to  _ me. _ ”   
  
He was fairly certain that wouldn't accomplish anything; the kid had already said he wasn't a reaper. But then again, reapers didn't just pick regular magic-less humans to be their assistants, did they? (Really, did they? It didn't  _ seem  _ like something they'd do.) Maybe the kid could answer their questions, or at least satisfy Wilhelm, because if a reaper couldn't tell who'd awakened him, probably nobody could, and a reaper's assistant was practically as good as a reaper himself. (No they weren't, but Wilhelm didn't know that.)   
  
“Okay,” Hanna said, figuring he'd go along with it. He left the room to retrieve Wilhelm, with a quick look to Conrad and Worth first to make sure it was okay to leave the kid with them for ten seconds. (They both looked uncomfortable to be in the same room with the snarky teenage not-reaper, but Worth at least had the pride to pretend he was bored, cleaning under his fingernails with a switch-blade; Conrad was staring at Hanna like he felt actively betrayed.) Down the hall, he found Lamont living up to his word and regaling the zombie with a tale of a slightly-younger Hanna breaking his arm running from an overzealous dog. (For the record, that was only what he'd told Lamont and Worth, because ghouls were a little hard to admit to at the time. He didn't think he'd bother to correct them now. Also for the record, breaking your arm still hurt like a bitch, even if you were nearly immortal.)   
  
“Hey, can I borrow your new best friend for a bit?”   
  
“Take him,” Lamont said. “I can finish the tale another time.”   
  
Wilhelm stood from the edge of the bed and joined Hanna at the doorway. “It was nice to meet you,” he told Lamont. “Thank you for the stories.”   
  
“Any time,” Lamont said, waving them out. “If you stick around long enough, you can trade me some of your own next time.”   
  
“Of course,” Wilhelm replied, looking quite pleased by the idea.   
  
“You're horrible,” Hanna told Lamont, reassured by the man's laughter that he understood Hanna as well as ever.   
  
Nothing interesting had happened back in the front office, unless you considered it interesting that Conrad and the mysterious teenager had started fighting with one another after less than a full minute. Hanna couldn't even tell what they were fighting  _ about _ , just that they were slinging insults back and forth, which actually seemed to be breaking the tension caused by the semi-failed spell. The name-calling ceased abruptly when the young man in the circle noticed who or what had followed Hanna back into the room. He almost seemed to choke on his own tongue.   
  
“What the  _ fuck?” _ he said, drawing the curse out into a soft, almost reverent-sounding whisper. “Is that a fucking  _ zombie?” _   
  
'That' wasn't a very nice way to refer to a person, although Hanna guessed it was a pretty common response for most people. Most regular people.  _ Reapers _ (and their sharp-toothed assistants) should probably be a little better schooled in undead-etiquette than that.   
  
“Yeah, he's a zombie. What? Is that weird to you or something?”   
  
The kid was staring Wilhelm down like he was a hideous monster (when, come on, who was the one with the teeth here?). Wilhelm waved, which seemed to bother the kid more than if the zombie had started groaning or snacking on a brain.   
  
“I can't believe this shit,” he said, shaking his head. “Ghosts are one thing. I didn't sign up for fucking  _ zombies _ .”   
  
Hanna sat down in one of the mismatched chairs lined up against the wall nearest the circle. Wilhelm stood at his side. “Ghosts are  _ way _ worse than zombies,” he told the kid, ready with a few personal stories if he needed proof.   
  
The reaper's-assistant didn't seem interested in debating. Mostly he seemed interested in staying far away from the rest of the lunatics in the room, if his still-wide eyes were anything to go off of. “Who  _ are _ you?” the teenager asked, far more defensive than genuinely curious.   
  
“Hanna Cross,” he said, gesturing with a short wave instead of opting to shake hands. It was better not to cross the circle lines more than necessary. “I'm a paranormal investigator. You?”   
  
The kid seemed hesitant to answer, like a child being forced to talk with some distant relative they only saw at Christmas parties and were pretty sure they wanted nothing to do with. “Veser,” he said. “Hatch. I go to the community college.”   
  
Conrad made a noise that sounded almost like a laugh from the other side of the room. “How the hell did a college kid end up working for a reaper?” he asked, smirking. He had his arms crossed more loosely now and was watching the three of them intently, as if they were a soap opera he found highly entertaining.   
  
“None of your fucking business!” Veser shot back at the vampire.   
  
Hanna agreed with Conrad though. “Yeah, that is weird. You're mortal, right?”   
  
“I guess?” He quirked an eyebrow like he couldn't quite believe the dumb-ass question. “If I wasn't, I sure as hell wouldn't be wasting my time at school.”   
  
“So why'd he pick you?” Hanna asked, pondering to himself.   
  
“He didn't,” Veser said, or 'admitted', it seemed. “I asked. He did me a favor. I'm just doing this to pay him back.” He looked uncomfortable with the situation, particularly his role in having caused it, like he'd feel better if he could blame it entirely on the reaper having forced him into it.   
  
Conrad laughed. “Sounds like shitty compensation.”   
  
“Yeah? I'd like to see you juggle all the shit I have to deal with.” Veser scowled, looking like he was ready to get physical with the vampire as soon as the barrier came down.   
  
Hanna probably would have sat there and watched the two fight for the rest of the afternoon, but Wilhelm nudged him gently and nodded toward Veser, so Hanna guessed he should probably get on that, yeah. “Hey, uh, Veser. I know you're not a reaper, but you kinda... Er, what exactly do you do?”   
  
“Uh.” Veser turned from his arguing with Conrad and tried to think of a good answer for Hanna. “I ...sort souls.”   
  
“I have no idea what that means,” Hanna said, imagining a hundred different things at once. As long as he'd been doing this necromancer gig, he'd never actually  _ seen _ a soul, as far as he knew. What did they even look like?   
  
“Yeah, I dunno,” Veser said with a shrug. “That's what I do.”   
  
It wasn't an answer, but Hanna didn't really need to know about soul-sorting right now. He figured he'd look into it later to satisfy his curiosity. “Uh, alright. So that means you can read souls, right?”   
  
“Kinda, I guess. Why?”   
  
Hanna grabbed a handful of Wilhelm's coat and pulled him forward a few inches. “Can you read his?” Normally he wouldn't consider this a smart question, given how many potential secrets were hiding in the recesses of the zombie's locked-down soul, but the chances of Veser being able to access these secrets was close to zero, and the chance of anybody else in this room taking him seriously in the event that he  _ was _ right were barely any higher.   
  
“Dude, do zombies even have souls?”   
  
All eyes looked to Hanna for the answer to a question at least half of them hadn't even wondered until now. “ _ Yes,  _ he has a soul!” he told them, bordering on offended (on behalf of his friend, at least). Did Wilhelm  _ seem _ soulless to them?   
  
“Well I can't read it,” Veser said, unapologetic.   
  
“What about the rest of us?” Conrad asked. “Can you read Hanna's?”   
  
Hanna was about 95% certain he knew the answer to that, but he stopped them before Veser could even try. (Just in case.) “He can't read living souls,” he told Conrad. “I mean, souls that are still in bodies. Right?” he asked Veser.   
  
“Yeah. Probably. I dunno, I just started this like a month ago.”   
  
“So basically you're useless then,” Conrad said, “and I let Hanna jab me with a needle for no reason.”   
  
Veser bared his teeth at the vampire, although it was perhaps only because they were so large and noticeable that he could hardly open his mouth without showing them off. “Hey! I didn't ask for you guys to bring me here! I was  _ actually studying!” _   
  
Leaving their fighting as background noise, Hanna turned to Wilhelm with what he hoped was a convincingly apologetic expression. “Well, that might just be as far as we can go for now.”   
  
“Shouldn't his master be able to help?” Wilhelm asked, reminding Hanna that if he wanted to pull the wool over the zombie's eyes, he was going to have to be a little smarter. Or more secretive, anyhow.   
  
“Yeah...  _ if _ he shows up. Which he probably won't. I mean, reapers are busy dudes. I doubt he would have bothered hiring an assistant if he had a lot of extra free time.”   
  
The zombie nodded slightly, conceding to Hanna's point, but not to the idea of giving up. “There's time left. Let's wait until the hourglass is empty.”   
  
There were about forty minutes left in it, forty minutes he didn't desperately need to use for anything else in particular, although he wanted to clean up this mess and get to thinking about his next move as soon as possible. Still, he said, “Yeah, of course,” as if waiting had been his plan all along.   
  
The next half hour was pretty boring. Veser had clammed up about the details of his working for a reaper and stopped rising to Conrad's bait, so the vampire had sat back down and buried his nose in his book again. Worth left the room entirely as soon as it calmed down, making Hanna promise to call him back if something relevant happened, because he still didn't quite trust any magic that used his own blood for fuel. Hanna chatted a little with Wilhelm, but for the most part sat in silence and waited, watching the sand stream down into the bottom half of the glass.   
  
He was trying to decide if he'd tell Veser he was free as soon as the sand ran out or if he was gonna wait for the kid to realize he wasn't trapped anymore (which, honestly, could be until he got hungry or had to pee or something enough to test his bonds again), when a figure appeared in his periphery. Hanna nearly jumped out of his skin (what a weird phrase, but at least not usually a literal one). Even though he'd been half expecting something to happen, it was always strange to notice a reaper when they entered the room. They didn't 'pop' into existence like a lot of other supernaturals did, and they didn't swirl out of the shadows; they just kind of  _ became. _ It was eerie.   
  
And they were silent too. Usually. This one was accompanied by an audible ticking, like that of a clock, that caused everyone who hadn't yet seen him (and Hanna, who hadn't yet looked at him) to turn in surprise to the corner where he stood.   
  
The reaper scanned the room, eyes lingering momentarily on Veser before fixing his gaze on Hanna. “Hann--  _ Mister  _ Cross,” he said in greeting, with a tilt of his head and a small, polite smile. “It's a pleasure to meet you again, although I don't particularly appreciate you kidnapping my protege.”   
  
“Protege?” Veser asked, face twisted in displeasure. “Yeah man, I'm not so sure about  _ that. _ ”   
  
Hanna thanked his lucky stars in relief that if he had to deal with a reaper today, at least it was this one. “Hey, Ples! Long time no see!”   
  
“A long time, indeed. I hadn't expected to see you again.”  _ '-after the last time,'  _ he didn't say, although both he and Hanna were aware of the unspoken words.   
  
“Stuff happens,” Hanna said by way of very general explanation. “Sorry about holding your assistant hostage. I just needed to talk to you-- I mean, not  _ you _ specifically. You know-- and for some reason we got him instead.”   
  
Ples unclasped his hands from behind his back and relaxed minutely. “I'll have to look into that,” he said, dashing Hanna's idea of it being intentional. “Although it would be preferable if you could simply refrain from attempting to summon my kind. We're quite busy to be dealing with trivial matters.”   
  
“Yeah, man!” Veser said, scrambling up from his spot on the floor. “I've got shit to do!”   
  
Hanna bowed his head in embarrassment or apology that wasn't entirely sincere, but close enough to satisfy. “I'll try not to get you too involved in my problems after this. But, since you're here? Think you could do me a tiny favor?”   
  
The reaper gave Hanna an absolutely desiccated dry look. “Perhaps.”   
  
Hanna stood and set a hand up on Wilhelm's shoulder. “Can you tell us what you sense from my undead client here? He's-- oh, wait. Hey, Connie!” He turned to give the vampire a cheesy smile, which caused Conrad to shudder even as he was scowling at the name. “Can you go get Worth? He said he wanted to be here.”   
  
Conrad got up from his chair in the corner and shuffled out of the room with little more than a grunt and a distrustful look. Hanna returned to his explanation. 

“Uh yeah, so Wilhelm here says he doesn't remember who brought him back or anything about his life. Aaand so we were thinking you, or, y'know, any reaper, I guess, could maybe give us some sort of clue where to start looking.”   
  
Ples looked between the two of them for what seemed to be several long minutes condensed into one bloated second which, Hanna supposed, it could really have been, given reapers' unusual relationship with time. The man appeared to recognize some of the situation (which Hanna had expected, as soon as he realized it was Ples; any  _ other  _ reaper would have been... harder to persuade toward relative silence), then seemed to wonder if Hanna was playing some sort of trick.   
  
“What sort of answer are you hoping for?”   
  
“A good one!” Hanna said enthusiastically. “But really, I'm kind of lost here, you know what I mean? I thought maybe you could read his soul and we'd go from there. Like, what kinda stuff do you sense?”   
  
Again, Ples took a long second to stare at the necromancer, and when the second was over, he seemed to have a better idea of how serious Hanna was. So he then fixed the zombie with his gaze and looked him over carefully, the time ticking along at pace that felt more natural. Fifteen, twenty seconds later, he returned his attention to Hanna.   
  
“I sense much blood,” he said for starters.   
  
Wilhelm looked down at Hanna in mild concern. “That's pretty common for the undead,” Hanna told him, brushing off his worry. “What else?” he asked Ples.   
  
“Determination. Valor. Loneliness.”   
  
Those were things Hanna knew for the most part, except... loneliness? Had he been lonely? The thought made Hanna shiver. They spent quite a lot of time together, those last few years at least. He felt his face dropping into a frown and wiped it back to neutral. “Anything  _ useful? _ ” he asked, trying to suppress the edginess he was trying not to feel. But really, he'd been  _ lonely? _ God. Hadn't he liked Hanna  _ at all?  _   
  
The reaper pulled a face that looked like it would be more at home on his irritable assistant. “Would you like to hear how he died?” Ples suggested, not content to let Hanna be as moody or ungrateful as he clearly felt he was being.   
  
' _ I dare you,'  _ said Hanna's expression for half a second before he backed down and gave the man a nervous, pleading half-smile.   
  
“I'd rather not,” Wilhelm said, surprising Hanna because for a moment he'd kind of forgotten... something? He just hadn't expected the zombie to present an actual opinion, since he'd been so acquiescent so far. It was fine, though! Actually, it was great. Hanna was beyond glad he had a real excuse not to have Ples remind him, in any amount of detail, what he'd never forgotten.   
  
Ples was surprised as well. “Ah, he speaks. I wasn't sure.”   
  
Hanna wasn't sure what Ples was getting at with that comment in that sly insinuating tone. “We don't need to know how he died. The issue is how he came back. Can you sense, I dunno, any weird magic on him?”   
  
“Plenty,” Ples said. “Most of which smells of  _ you _ , Mister Cross.”   
  
That wasn't a surprise to anybody, particularly to Hanna, who knew that Wilhelm had been  _ covered  _ in his 'weird magic' more than a few times. “Can you smell any other magic users?” he asked, hopeful. This was the question. This was what  _ he _ needed to know, regardless of what Wilhelm was hoping to find out or what ended up happening. If there was someone else, he needed to find out who it was and... deal with them. Kick some ass and then maybe thank them, and then kick their ass again because how dare they bring Wilhelm back without his permission!   
  
The reaper took a deep breath, as if actually smelling for different magics (though Hanna knew he just said 'smell' because there was no better way to describe the sense; Hanna dealt with similar things sometimes and smell was a good word for them because no other sense was as visceral). “There is something,” he told Hanna. “Something faint. It is hard to read, but it is distinctly different from the scent of your magic.”   
  
“Hard to read?” Hanna asked, incredulous. “For  _ you? _ Isn't this basically all you ever do?”   
  
“There are some things that are beyond even the skills of a reaper,” Ples said, looking down at Hanna from behind glasses he probably didn't really need. “Things that exist beyond the realms of life and death are as much a mystery to me as to you. Perhaps  _ more  _ mysterious to me than you, given your history.”   
  
That wasn't what Hanna wanted to hear at all, especially if he was understanding correctly what Ples was implying. What things did Hanna have more experience with than did  _ reapers,  _ who lived eternally between life and death? Things he didn't want to think about. Dangerous things. He was well-versed in things from beyond the grave, but the things that dwelt beyond  _ that _ ...   
  
Well, he had just enough knowledge to know to fear them.   
  
Why would a thing like  _ that _ be there? Remnants from....? No, that wasn't enough to have gotten in his soul.  _ Hanna's  _ soul, sure, or what was left of it, but not his. There wasn't something Hanna didn't know about him, was there? He didn't think so; he'd always felt he could read the man like an open book. But maybe pages were missing...   
  
This was dumb. Worrying was not helping. It didn't matter where this hard-to-read little 'something' had come from, why it was hiding there in his friend's soul-- he could figure that out afterward if he still cared. For now, it was a starting point, a lead to follow.   
  
“How are we supposed to find this thing?” Hanna asked, hoping the reaper had some advice to moor him in what felt like the stormy waters of uncertainty.   
  
“I could most likely get a better understanding if I could more deeply read his soul,” Ples said, not allowing Hanna more than a split second of hope before continuing, “but I haven't the time. I'm busy and you've kept me too long.”   
  
“What!” An easy answer, snatched from their fingertips. Wasn't that just  _ like _ a reaper. “Then wh-”   
  
“Take Veser,” Ples offered before Hanna could protest too much. “He may be able to guide you in the right direction.”   
  
An assistant was no comparison to the real thing, as they'd seen earlier, and Hanna wanted to argue, but Veser got to it first.   
  
“What the hell? No way, man! I've got class tomorrow! If I miss this test, Lee is gonna be pissed.”   
  
Ples nodded calmly in the face of his assistant's outrage. “I said I would not interfere with your normal routine, and I will not. Help them after you've finished your class and consider that your work for the evening.”   
  
The answer seemed acceptable to Veser, except for the doubt that was much like Hanna's about the situation. “Okay, I guess, but what are you expecting me to be able to do?”   
  
“Yeah, no offense, but he's not exactly a real reaper,” Hanna added.   
  
“I'm really not,” Veser agreed, most certainly not offended.   
  
Ples smiled, unswayed by their joint arguments. “I have faith in your ability to help them find the answers they are looking for.”   
  
Hanna wasn't sure about that, but it didn't do to question a reaper too many times. He had offered his assistant's assistance, so that was what they were getting. “Er, okay. Thanks, I guess,” Hanna said as Veser grumbled his begrudging acceptance of his boss's assignment, despite the misgivings everyone but Ples had about the teen's abilities.   
  
“You are most welcome,” Ples said, though at best he seemed only  _ slightly _ welcoming. “However, the next time you feel you require aid, please consider a less intrusive method of asking.”   
  
“Yeah, I'll, uh, do that,” Hanna said, pretty sure he was going to renege on his promise while the words were still fresh from his lips.   
  
The reaper could probably see through Hanna's lies like they were glass (simply because he  _ knew _ him), but he didn't protest, apparently lacking the time necessary to properly lecture the necromancer. “Now, as I've said, I really must be going. Please do try not to get my assistant into too much trouble.” He didn't wait around for goodbyes before he was simply gone.   
  
Hanna shook his head at the suddenly empty space. “Well. That sure was... something.”   
  
Veser was gaping up at where Ples's face would have been. “The hell?! He was supposed to get me out of here before he ran off again! Piece of shit old man! Dude.” He turned to Hanna with a pleading expression. “You got to talk to a reaper. Will you let me go now? Come on, please.”   
  
“Yeah, alright,” Hanna said with a shrug like he  _ supposed _ he could find it in him to let the kid out of the circle. He didn't bother to point out that the paint had all smoldered itself into fine ashes after the sand in the hourglass ran out, and that Veser probably could have left any time in the last several minutes. Instead he knelt down and swiped a hand through one of the ash lines, sure to be as dramatic as possible. It didn't hurt for the kid to think Hanna was doing him a favor.   
  
Veser stepped gingerly over the smeared ash lines and brushed himself off. “Great. Now to figure out how to get home. God, we're still in the city, right? What is this place anyway?”   
  
“It's a doctor's office,” Hanna told him. “Um. Sort of.”   
  
“Yeah, I bet,” Veser said, giving the place one last look around before locating the front door. “There a bus station around here somewhere?”   
  
“A couple blocks down,” Hanna said, gesturing vaguely in that direction. “So when's your class end tomorrow and when should we meet you? You're still gonna help us, right?”   
  
The teen stopped short of the door and looked like he was debating just making a dash for it but his conscience or work ethic was preventing him from skipping out. “Yeah, I guess,” he said with a sigh. “Not like I really have a choice.” (Hanna felt a little bad about that, but hey, the situation wasn't perfect for him either.) “Uh... My class is at 3:00, so I should be done by like 5:00. If you wanna meet me at the college around then, we can, y'know, whatever.”   
  
' _ Whatever' _ was about Hanna's plan too. What could they hope to find with the skills of someone who was at best a reaper in training, and at worst just an idiot teenager, even if they figured out what to look for? At this point, the purpose of even bothering was mostly to appease Wilhelm, who actually looked quite excited about the prospect of investigating, as much as he  _ could _ look excited these days.   
  
“We'll be there,” Hanna said, waving Veser off as he left without further ado.   
  
And that was that, more or less. Hanna and Wilhelm set about sweeping up the ashes the blood paint had turned into, pouring them into a little baggy to take with them because, as Hanna said, “Who knows, they might be useful.” (Lots of stuff was potentially useful as spell ingredients. In truth, these ashes held more than a mysterious potential; he knew exactly what he was going to use them for.)   
  
Conrad returned as Hanna was setting the hourglass back on Worth's desk. “I finally get him awake and he just tells me to 'bugger off'! I guess he wasn't that concerned after-- oh. They're gone. What did the reaper tell you?”   
  
“Not much,” Hanna told him. “So the quest continues.”   
  
“Hmm. Good luck,” Conrad said, without an ounce of the expected sarcasm, leading Hanna to believe the grouchy vampire might have actually decided that the zombie at least was worth his civility.   
  
“Thank you,” Wilhelm said, and Conrad responded with a more characteristic bored 'mm-hmm' before falling into Worth's desk chair (really, the only good place to sit in the whole office) and getting back to his book.   
  
With the bag of ashes stuffed in his pants pocket (and hopefully forgotten or disregarded by his zombie friend), Hanna led the way out into the dull light of the evening. The ritual had taken longer than he was expecting, so he was glad they'd gotten to it so early. (Any later and they'd have probably risked getting Veser in just his boxers or something, and they didn't need it to be any more awkward than it already was.)   
  
The early night was less nice than the morning had been. A storm had rolled in while they were sequestered in Worth's grungy office and turned the dust of the street into a thin greasy mud. It was only sprinkling at the moment, but they hurried home, hoping to avoid a downpour from the dark clouds not far in the distance. They were safe inside the apartment before the heavier drops started coming down, gently at first, then quickly and steadily.   
  
Wilhelm was visibly relieved to have missed becoming soaked, probably remembering Hanna's warning from earlier about getting wet. Hanna, on the other hand, couldn't manage relief at the moment. The best he could do was try not to seem preoccupied enough to cause Wilhelm to wonder. He sat down on his sofa-arm perch and smiled up at his companion. “Alrighty, we've got plans!” he said, giving a thumbs-up and hoping it didn't seem  _ too _ positive. “Maybe we'll finally get some of this mess figured out tomorrow.”   
  
“I hope,” the zombie said, taking his spot opposite Hanna. He paused just a moment before asking Hanna in a way that seemed like he was trying not to be too nosy, “Did you know that reaper? Ples? You appeared to be quite familiar with each other.”   
  
Familiar was maybe too nice of a word, but it would do. Hanna guessed they might be something like friends if you could be friends with an entity so ruthlessly devoted to their job. It wasn't Ples's fault, but... “Yeah, we've worked together a few times,” Hanna told him. “He's a pretty nice guy, but I was hoping not to have to see him again because, you know, you only really see reapers when someone's died. So.”   
  
“Mm.”   
  
They sat quietly for a few minutes, listening to the rain fall on the roof and against the one tiny window in the bedroom. Hanna wanted to talk to Wilhelm, wanted to say... anything. Lots of things. Important things, menial things. But he  _ needed _ to talk to Ples again. He stood abruptly, surprising the zombie out of his own quiet contemplations.   
  
“Uh, y'know, I think I left something at Worth's. I'd better go get it.”   
  
“Should I come with you?”   
  
Hanna shook his head, already at the door. “Nah, I got it. You should probably stay out of the rain anyway. It won't take me long!” He didn't wait for Wilhelm to protest or acquiesce to the suggestion and was down the stairs before he even knew where he was going. He needed someplace dry where there weren't going to be any squatters or tourists hiding from the rain or prying eyes of any sort, preferably. His mind ran through a list of less-popular public places and abandoned buildings and covered alleys. Of course, he could actually return to Worth's; Conrad wouldn't care what he did, if he was even still there... but the thought of anyone else hearing what Ples probably had to say about the situation made him feel sick, as if poison was flowing through his veins instead of blood.   
  
His hair was heavy with rain, red washed a muddy clay brown and curls soaked into tired tangles as he jogged into the darker part of the city where even less of the old streetlights managed to cling to life. He slowed to a walk as he came to the parking lot of a disused shopping center and picked out a small store he'd tracked some spirits to a while back. The windows were barred, but the glass was shattered from years of bored troublemakers throwing rocks through them, and the front door was locked and plastered with faded notices and advertisements. The back door, however, was unlocked, so he let himself in and scribbled a few light-giving runes in places where the wallpaper hadn't yet peeled all the way to the floor.   
  
It took him a moment to get his bearings and shake the worst of the water from his hair, but as soon as he was sure he was truly alone and not going to drip too badly on his spell, he pulled the bag of ashes out from his pocket and began pouring them into a circle that was almost identical to the one from earlier. This one was smaller and sloppier, but distinctly more aggressive, rough around the edges of the runes and more than a little desperate, like the ones from his youth. The ones he'd made then, though, well, those hadn't been personal.   
  
Ashes weren't the same as fresh blood. It would work, but it needed something more...   
  
_ 'Are you really going to do this?'  _ some part of his conscience asked him, even as he took the little knife from his back pocket, where it had hid with his ubiquitous Sharpie.  _ 'Is it important enough to go back on your word? Remember what you told him.'   
  
_ What he'd done earlier was necromancy too, but this was different, as his conscience was happy to point out. He wasn't sure exactly why; it wasn't a textbook science. Maybe it was pain that made the distinction. The prick of a needle wasn't enough to tip the scale over to truly black magic. Was a slice on a palm? He felt like it was.   
  
_ 'Maybe it's the guilt that makes it so bad,'  _ he thought, as he brought the blade down to pierce his soft, pale skin.   
  
“What are you doing?” a voice asked from behind him.   
  
The knife slipped as he jumped, slicing a good inch further up his hand than he'd meant to. He swore as he turned and shot back at Ples, “what are  _ you _ doing?”   
  
“I'd say this is unexpected,” Ples said, eying the ash circle and the hand that Hanna clutched in pain, “but after so long, I'm rarely truly surprised by the strange things you mortals do.”   
  
“You should check out the internet some time,” Hanna joked, still cradling his bloody hand and lamenting the waste of such  _ good _ pain. “I guess if we're not surprising to you, you know why I was planning on calling you.”   
  
Ples fished a handkerchief from his pocket and dropped it to Hanna. “That smells horribly. Please clean it up,” he requested, only answering the question after Hanna had stemmed the flow of blood as much as he could. (It was his non-dominant hand, luckily, so he was able to scribble a few amateur healing-type runes on the handkerchief before wrapping himself up. He didn't hesitate to deface the square of fabric; there was no way the reaper was going anywhere near the thing again, after it'd been soaked in Hanna's nasty blood.) “I surmise you wanted to speak with me in private. Away from the abomination your good friend seems to have become. That is the reason I came. It was clear that something was wrong.”   
  
“Lots of things are wrong,” Hanna said, feeling like he simply could not overstate that fact. “What do you know?”   
  
“That the undead man you're hiding from is the man you buried over a century ago.”   
  
“Yeah,” Hanna said, waiting for Ples to go on, because that was only the most rudimentary of observations, far beneath a reaper's capabilities.   
  
“You denounced black magic when he died,” Ples said, sounding nearly as confused as Hanna felt. “What inspired you to bring him back after so long? And why do you not tell him?”   
  
Every muscle in Hanna's body seemed to seize at those words, those damn words. “I didn't bring him back,” he said, and he meant to sound indignant, sure of himself, but ended up just sounding worried.   
  
The confusion grew on the reaper's face, and Hanna might have found it funny ( _ reapers? Confused _ about something? They were usually such know-it-alls) if the whole situation weren't horrible. “You most certainly did. Why do you lie about it?”   
  
“I think I'd remember something like that!” Honestly, Hanna wasn't sure about that, as he wasn't sure about it when the zombie came to his door and the thought first crossed his mind. “And if I was gonna bring him back, I wouldn't have waited so long!”   
  
“Mortals do strange things in their loneliness. He smells entirely of your manipulation,” the reaper said, meaning the necromancy he and his kind found so distasteful.   
  
“What about that other thing you smelled on him?” Hanna asked, grasping for some certainty and some excuse. “You meant it was a demon, right?!”   
  
Ples shook his head, not 'no', but 'stop'. “Yes, but it was not a demon that brought him back, it was you. It is as clear as death to me. I am quite familiar with the style of your magic and the smell of your awful blood.”   
  
That could not be, Hanna thought, although a part of him had already accepted it, long before it was spoken.  _ 'It had to have been me. There's no one else, no other reason, and I wanted to for so long.' 'But I was over him. I was strong enough!'  
  
_ “Love makes people act strangely,” Ples said, as if trying to console Hanna with excuses he could tell himself. “Apparently even to forget one's own transgressions. Ignorance is bliss, is it not? Is that why you are keeping him uninformed about your shared past as well?”   
  
There was only one real answer to that question, because even if... whatever the case was, Hanna's motivations had always (at least since he'd gotten to know the detective) been for love, if the obsessive, selfish kind. But he didn't want to answer the question when the prerequisites were still so muddy. “He spent a lot of time around me back then. Isn't that why he smells like my magic?”   
  
The reaper was unimpressed by Hanna's sad attempt to delay accepting his actions. “That is no reason for it to be carved into his soul.”   
  
Quite a few ideas ran through Hanna's head, mostly fantasy things with no bearing on real life.  _ 'Maybe it's because he's secretly a magic user too. Maybe he did it to himself. Maybe God brought him back. Maybe it was his love for me.'  _ The last thought was so pathetically unlikely that Hanna laughed. Ples looked at him with concern obvious in his eyes.   
  
“I believe things will work out for the best if you are honest with him,” he suggested.  
  
Honesty? To Hanna, that seemed almost like happy endings, one of those things people always extolled but never actually managed in their own lives. At best, most people ended up with mediocrity and half-truths, contentment and white lies. At worst? Honesty would just destroy what little chance there already was of happiness between them. Knowing reapers, that was Ples's idea.   
  
Hanna put his hands in his pants pockets. Maybe it was the blood loss, but he was feeling cold. “I know you hate zombies. You want me to tell him the truth so he remembers he never wanted to come back in the first place and lets himself die again?”   
  
“That's not it,” Ples said, shaking his head at the accusation. “Yes, I dislike the undead on a professional level, but this is friendly advice. I recall your friend was an understanding man. I do not think he will refuse to forgive you. Whether he desires to continue living as an undead, I have no way of knowing.”   
  
That wasn't enough. Yes, forgiveness was tantalizing, and Ples was a good judge of character, but there was no guarantee. No man would readily forgive what Hanna had done, no matter how understanding; and that was  _ without _ Hanna having (apparently?) been the one to bring him back. Factor  _ that _ in and there was simply no way that Wilhelm could just brush it all aside as if it were nothing. No, no, as Hanna had first concluded, it was better to just start over.   
  
“Thanks,” Hanna said, and Ples sighed, knowing the necromancer wasn't going to take his advice.   
  
“You are as stubborn as ever,” he said, staring out the grime-covered back window as Hanna began trying to gather the unused ashes. “If you still think your answer lies in the demon, then I wish you luck finding it. Be careful this time. And as I requested before, please do your best not to get my assistant killed.”   
  
Hanna tried to scoop most of the ashes back into the ziploc without touching them, but in the end he was too clumsy with his injured palm and had to resort to sweeping them with his clean hand, smearing ashes everywhere in the process. He didn't really care; the pouring rain would take care of it well enough. “Speaking of your assistant,” Hanna began, happy to change the subject, “is that a 'strange thing you did in your loneliness'? ”   
  
“I am not here to answer questions about my professional life.”   
  
“It was a personal question,” Hanna said.   
  
“All the more reason to ignore it,” Ples responded, though Hanna knew the man would answer him if he pressed a little harder. Instead he shrugged.   
  
“Fine. I'll ask Veser tomorrow.”   
  
Ples simply crossed his arms and stared down at Hanna with a hard expression that held a hint of caring. “Return to your home, small necromancer. And tell your 'Wilhelm' the truth; he deserves that at the least.”   
  
Hanna stood and made a futile attempt at brushing the wet dust and ashes off his damp pants. “Uh-huh,” he said, well beyond bothering to make his lies sound genuine (at least to Ples; his most authentic ones went to the zombie). “Thanks for all your 'help'.”   
  
“Stop getting into such trouble and you won't need to rely on my 'help',” Ples replied, deadpan, but aware that Hanna truly was... at least  _ a little  _ grateful, despite his recent moodiness. He left without any further goodbyes and Hanna watched the empty spot he left behind for a few minutes while he sorted through his new information and... advice.   
  
The advice, of course, was garbage. Like hell he was going to tell Wilhelm  _ everything _ . Yes, he definitely wanted to tell the man as much as he could without getting himself in trouble, but unfortunately that amounted to basically nothing. Not like he could say, 'Hey, you know, we actually knew each other back in the day,' because then the zombie would be like, 'You knew me?! What was my name?', or more likely, 'Why the fucking hell did you not tell me earlier?!', although probably less profane and more... heart-broken and betrayed. Yes, no, that wasn't going to happen. Hanna could play it off like maybe they'd just passed each other on the street a few times, but what would be the point of that? It would still cause more problems than it would solve, if it solved anything.   
  
Ugh. This was a mess, and talking to Ples had just made it worse. And his hand was in serious discomfort, and the lingering dampness of his clothes caused the rest of him to be in mild discomfort on top of that. He figured now would be a good time to at least take one part of the reaper's advice and head home, so he scratched out the light runes and exited back out into the storm. He was in far less of a rush to go back than he had been to get out of there, but still, he wanted to go home.   
  
_ 'Home, huh? Where the heart is? It's been a while.'   
  
_ The rain dripped down his arms and soaked into the handkerchief still wrapped around his hand, the chill of the water stark against the heat of his skin where it was trying to mend itself. It was probably dumb of him to so readily offer his blood just to get some answers. He knew, he should have learned that ages ago. But he'd freaked out. Hell, he was still freaked out. What was he even doing?   
  
Hanna took a deep breath, standing a little straighter from his hunched-up miserable posture. What was he  _ doing? _ He was desperately trying to protect his  _ home _ , that was what. Fruitlessly, maybe, yeah, but if it came down to it, he'd just about offer all the blood in his body to keep his heart somewhere he could park the rest of him too. It wasn't much good to him six feet under.   
  
He hurried home the rest of the way, but fighting himself each step because home was where  _ he _ was and, unfortunately, home was where his dark secrets were too, and it was hard to tell which one was stronger. Eventually, Hanna did end up back at the apartment, so clearly his desire to hide from his problems was not enough to override his desire to see his undead companion.   
  
The man was not in the living room or the attached kitchen when Hanna returned, and he wondered where in the world the zombie would  _ go _ , especially since it was still raining. He only wondered for a moment though, because the man appeared in the hallway from the bathroom as soon as he heard Hanna poking around in the kitchen for some place to put the ashes he'd managed to save.   
  
“You're back.”  
  
Hanna waved in his general direction without taking his head out from behind the cabinet door. “Oh, hey, Constantine.”

  
“What did you do to your hand?” the man asked, frowning at the bloody mess of handkerchief wrapped around Hanna's palm. He approached the mage and took his hand gently to inspect it himself.   
  
“I, uh, slipped. In the rain. And fell on a broken bottle.” With the ashes stored in the proper spot, Hanna closed the cabinet door and began to give the zombie the requisite sheepish grin, which quickly turned into a nervous sort of giggle when he looked at the man holding his bandaged hand softly and saw what he was wearing. Or rather, not. “Uh, why are you shirtless? Not that I m-- I mean, it's totally cool, but... why?”   
  
Constantine looked up, his brow still furrowed in consternation over Hanna's wound. “I was looking at myself in the mirror,” he said, seemingly completely unashamed at his state of undress. (Which wasn't weird, Hanna had to remind himself. Most guys didn't bat an eyelash at being half-naked in front of other people. And Hanna wasn't squeamish about other peoples' nudity or anything; it was just surprising.) “I became curious after you mentioned my eyes yesterday.”   
  
“That makes sense,” Hanna said, a little faintly.   
  
“Do you think the scars on my body have any relevance? There are quite a few of them.”   
  
Hanna laughed nervously in somewhat the opposite way than he had just a moment ago. “Heck if I know,” he lied expertly.   
  
The zombie released Hanna's hand and turned to point out a long scar on his side that stretched onto his back. “I can't see my back,” he said. “Does this one go much further?”   
  
The scar in question went a few inches out of the man's vision, reaching almost to the middle of his back. However, that particular wound had nothing to do with his death or, if Hanna recalled correctly, anything supernatural at all. “It goes to about here,” he said, tracing the line of the scar with his finger and shivering at the touch as if someone was tracing his own scars. This was... the first time he'd touched this scar in over a hundred years. He remembered helping patch it up back when it was bleeding freely, touching the red skin with the determination necessary to apply bandages but softly enough to avoid inflicting any more pain, wishing the detective would just carry a couple amulets on him, god, this could have been fatal!   
  
It was almost the first time he'd touched his skin  _ at all _ for over a hundred years. It was a peculiar sensation. The flesh was solid; that preservation charm had done a hell of a job. (No surprise; Hanna had poured all his desperation into it, until he was so empty of emotion he hardly recognized himself.) Despite the greenish color, it didn't feel rotten, just dry, a little papery. Constantine's scars had more the smooth texture of plastic. Hanna traced back over that one scar again as he hesitantly allowed himself to look at the more prominent wounds, the ones he'd never had the opportunity to trace.   
  
“Are there others?” Constantine asked, looking over his shoulder.   
  
“Yeah,” Hanna said. “There's... a little one right here behind your shoulder.”  _ 'From being nicked by a bullet.'  _ He ran a thumb over the scar, his other fingers brushing over the skin on the ball of the man's shoulder, which was tighter there. He weaved down with his eyes through the mess in the center of the back to find another close to the base of the spine. “One here,” he said, touching it lightly. This one was small and symmetrical, a slice from a dagger, Hanna thought. Next was under a shoulder-blade. “Looks like this one's a burn,” he told Constantine, softly edging around the mark, raised and still an almost pinkish color. That was the last time they ever dealt with flame atronachs, that was for sure.   
  
Constantine flexed the muscles in his back. “What about the ones in the middle? I can feel the ridges. They're stiff, more than the rest.”   
  
“I, uh, wouldn't really call those scars...” The wounds there, while obviously not fresh, had clearly not had time to heal. “I'm not a doctor or anything, but I'd say--”   
  
“--From when I died.”   
  
“Yeah.” A sickening sort of curiosity came over Hanna and he held his breath as he touched one of the horrible ridges ever so lightly. “Does that hurt?”   
  
The zombie shook his head slowly. “I can't feel it.”   
  
So Hanna allowed himself the freedom to explore the area like he'd never got the chance to before. They were disgusting, though not because they were bloody or anything; there wasn't a trace of blood left anywhere, not even dried flakes clinging to the tattered edges of the gashes. They were disgusting because of what they were. Long, wide cuts, five deep slashes evenly spaced, diagonally across the greater expanse of his back. He felt them like a ghost in the tendons in his fingers, like sandpaper on the skin of his fingertips.   
  
“What do they look like?”   
  
“Gruesome,” Hanna said.   
  
Constantine pulled away just a little. “You don't have to look at them anymore. Thank you.”   
  
In a way, he wanted to keep looking at them, maybe  _ needed _ to. The reality of things was soaking in slowly but steadily as if he was absorbing it through the tips of his fingers. The old scars were fairly familiar to him, but those wounds had been buried fresh, out of sight and out of mind, and some piece of Hanna's brain always seemed to want to convince him that it was all part of his imagination. Seeing them, feeling them, turned it back from the nightmare it had become and, surprisingly, it made him feel  _ less _ guilty.   
  
He reached out and laid his hand back between the zombie's shoulder-blades, the edge of his non-injured palm covering the very top of the shortest gash. “Wait,” he said.   
  
“Did you notice something?” Constantine asked, turning just his head so Hanna's hand could remain where he'd placed it. 

What he'd  _ noticed  _ was a sense of peace that was totally at odds with the fear still screaming in the back of his head. “No, I just....”   
  
_ 'Now would be a great time to take Ples' advice,'  _ Hanna's conscience said.  _ 'Just tell him! Sure you don't know all the details, but when did you ever? You can work through it together! It's better that way.'  _   
  
“...I just ...felt something.” His fingers twitched unconsciously, scratching lightly at the back of Constantine's neck.   
  
The zombie looked hopeful. “Do you need to study them more?”   
  
“No,” Hanna said, even as his hand slid down to the nearest of the gashes. “I think I need to sleep on it.” He blinked heavily and consciously pulled himself away.   
  
“Oh. Sleep well, then,” Constantine said, facing Hanna as he felt the loss of touch. He seemed disappointed about the turn of events.   
  
Hanna would agree, but it just felt like too much to deal with at the moment. Still, he couldn't help but catch the zombie's eye as he stepped around him toward the bedroom, and held his gaze like there was a small universe in the depths of his pupils that was hard to look away from. “Thanks,” he said, barely having the presence of mind not to add 'you too'.   
  
“Hanna.”   
  
He was at the doorway to his room, his mattress in sight, the promise of a few quiet hours to collect himself and rest his tired conscience, but there was never a time he didn't want to hear what his companion had to say. He turned back to him, resting his hand on the doorway. (He felt he needed an anchor; these days he felt the increasing need to hold something solid in his grasp.)   
  
Constantine's eyebrows sat high above the orange glow of his intuitive eyes, set at a soft, sympathetic angle. “You can talk to me,” he said.   
  
When two people held opposing opinions, how could you tell which was the right one? There was nothing Hanna could say, so he just nodded and let his anchored hand give a small parting wave as it followed him into the room. Perhaps he would thank Constantine tomorrow, perhaps he would trust him with some honesty. And perhaps he'd end up cursing himself and that reaper for the rest of his life when his advice ended up being as bad as he suspected it was, but the only thing he could be fairly sure about was that inaction was eating away at him, and something needed to be done.   
  
Whatever that something was, though, it wasn't going to be tonight. Hanna was in no mood to be making decisions.   
  
The mattress and blankets didn't feel as comfortable as when he was really dead-tired (he was emotionally exhausted, but that was a different thing entirely; his physical body was too tense), but right now he didn't have the luxury of being picky about it. Sleep was his refuge. He closed his eyes and welcomed it.   
  



	6. Chapter 6

The table was rather covered in glass jars and bowls of powders and herbs and such, but the cat somehow still found space to jump up and leave a dead mouse in front of his master, and without knocking any of the ingredients onto the floor. Hanna was glad about that, at least, but still wasn't sure exactly what Sith thought he was supposed to do with a deceased rodent.   
  
“I appreciate the thought, but if you're trying to feed me you should know I prefer chicken.”   
  
Sith gave him that mile-long stare all cats were so adept at and batted at the mouse with his paw a little.   
  
“Oh yeah?” Hanna said, laughing as he realized what his familiar was requesting. “Alright, alright, just give me a minute.” There were a couple of larger jars he normally kept his more frequently used ingredients in, and he was supposed to be sorting through them, but he guessed he could spare one for the afternoon if it meant it would keep his cat happy. He dumped what little remained of his ginger roots into a bowl of dried belladonna petals (those didn't react, did they? He was pretty sure they didn't), and swept the mouse into the empty jar. Then he found a stick of chalk and some floor space he wasn't likely to need for a while, and set up a little resurrection circle with the jar in the middle. He said the words with a hand over the jar and didn't really bother to make sure it had worked before getting back to his sorting.   
  
Hanna had mostly forgotten about it by the time the detective let himself in a little later.   
  
“Is there a deficit of mice today?” he asked, approaching the jar and the cat who was still watching from the corner of his eye and trying to pretend he was not interested in it at all. “I'm sure he would have more fun catching a new one than watching one he's already killed.”   
  
“He seems to enjoy it,” Hanna said.   
  
The detective crouched down opposite of Sith and inspected the little mouse inside, who was suddenly not sure which side of the glass to scramble at anymore, so surrounded. “How long will it stay like this?”   
  
“I'm not really sure,” Hanna said, setting down the jars he'd been redistributing ingredients into. He came over to the other side of the room and stood behind the detective, looking down at the mouse for the first time since it was brought back. “'Til it turns to rot, I suppose. I've never tried it before.”   
  
The look the detective gave him was enough to dissuade Hanna. He still thought it was an interesting experiment, but he knew the detective would disapprove greatly of him having an undead pet, and he didn't want to discourage the man from visiting just for the sake of curiosity. (Corpses made the man uneasy enough when they were still rather fresh; a shambling pile of rot, even if it was only as small as a mouse, would probably be too much for him to handle on a regular basis.)   
  
“I think you should let it go,” the man said, still watching the poor little creature hyperventilate (or mimic doing so, out of habit).   
  
“If I let it out of the circle it will just--”   
  
The detective interrupted Hanna with an earnest look. “I know.”   
  
The man was right, of course, always ready to be the moral and logical compass between the two of them, so Hanna moved the jar aside with little grumbling. Sith seemed annoyed that the mouse was once again inanimate, but as pointed out earlier, he could just go catch another if he really wanted to, and probably  _ should _ for the sake of the apartment's cleanliness anyway. He wandered off, and the humans stood to greet each other.   
  
“What brings you to my humble abode?” Hanna asked, as if the detective did not spend more time at the necromancer's humble abode than his own.   
  
“I'm making dinner tonight,” the detective told him. “I have a new recipe I'd like to try.”   
  
Hanna turned half away, letting a smile creep up on the side of his face that was hidden from the detective. “Oh? You'll have to tell me how that turns out.”   
  
The detective laughed a little puff of air, and Hanna was glad to see the man's good mood wasn't spoiled by the undead mouse. “Don't be coy,” he said. “Are your dishes clean or should we eat at my apartment?”   
  
“They're clean,” Hanna said, unable to stop the smile from spreading to the visible side of his face. Nights when the detective offered to cook were some of his favorites; Hanna's own culinary ability was miniscule at best, and his appetite these days was so low he often didn't bother to eat but for the few nights per week when they shared meals.   
  
“Then come out to get the ingredients with me.”   
  
It was evening, temperature and weather much the same as any other recent night. The walk to the market was a short trip, but they took their time, nonchalantly observing the people coming and going, sometimes stopped by people they'd helped with some problem or another or folks they passed on a daily basis. It had been several days since the two of them had met, so Hanna enjoyed the casual stroll and the chatter that went along with it.   
  
“What's been keeping you so busy?” he asked, wondering what had interrupted the pleasant trend the detective had had recently of visiting him daily.   
  
“Mundane things,” the detective told him with a shrug to convey his boredom. “Nothing as exciting as when you are involved, I promise.”   
  
Hanna grinned. “I hope not. Can't have you having fun without me.”   
  
“Your estimation of fun is quite strange,” the detective said, although Hanna was sure the man did not find it nearly so strange as he professed.   
  
“What, you think  _ that's _ more fun than what we do together? Whatever it is you've been doing lately?”   
  
“Politics,” the detective offered with a small grimace. “Debate over upcoming elections. They'll be choosing a new police chief.” Hanna laughed, though it was an ugly one that clearly demonstrated his opinion of police and politics, not that the detective was unaware of the magic user's thoughts on authority and all that surrounded it. He was quite in agreeance, at least about this particular aspect. “Yes, it's not nearly as interesting as your job.”  
  
Not nearly as interesting as a reanimated corpse or buried treasure or a murder mystery was a vast understatement, in the less-than-humble opinion of the necromancer, but it was an important part of his friend's job, he supposed. Even so, it was neither of their forte. “Let me know when there's another murder or kidnapping,” he requested. “Until then, I'm sorry, I'll have to leave you to handle the boring police work on your own.”   
  
“I'm sure something horrible will happen soon enough,” the detective said with a humoring smile.   
  
They returned home with the necessary ingredients and the detective got to work preparing the dish while Hanna returned to his sorting. (He promised himself he wouldn't let his stock get this out of hand next time.) The cats showed themselves while the man was cooking, and he fed them a little leftover cream. Their pleased purring along with the bubbling of dinner boiling on the stove and the fragrant smells of the meal made for a nice backdrop to Hanna's sorting, and he found himself lulled into a comfortable daze, hands moving automatically as his mind drifted.   
  
This was not something he had ever expected to have, not since home-cooked meals and familial warmth were ripped from him at a young age. It was very domestic, at least a step closer to the sort of life people usually expected than the one he'd been living before he'd met the detective. Part of him balked at it, the part that scoffed at the idea of needing anybody else in his life, of relying on anyone other than himself. But it wasn't as if he  _ needed _ the detective, he reminded himself. Neither of them relied on the other, they simply enjoyed each other's company. There was nothing wrong with that, especially when it came with dinner.   
  
The food was wonderful, as Hanna had expected. Much better than anything he'd make on his own, most certainly.   
  
“What do you think?” the detective asked, putting more effort into watching Hanna eat than getting food into his own mouth.   
  
“Not bad,” Hanna said, the faintness of the praise betrayed by the way he shoveled food down and the way the detective understood him. Truth was too much yet.   
  
Although Hanna felt increasingly that he would be honest one day. One day, but not yet.   
  
Conversation between them was sparse as they ate, Hanna's mouth far too full to initiate many topics, the detective content with the silence. But once his plate was clear, the necromancer did bring up something that had come to mind after their conversation from earlier.   
  
“Do you think you'll run? For police chief.”   
  
The detective seemed to consider it, as if he hadn't thought about it before now. “Probably not,” he said.   
  
To Hanna, it seemed like an obvious choice. There was no reason why the man should not at least put his name in for consideration. It was an opportunity to make better money, far more reliable than the earnings he made working case-by-case. He was well-liked by both the citizens he'd helped and the people he worked with, and he honestly cared about protecting the peace. (In Hanna's opinion, he was the only man in the force who was worthy of respect, let alone a lofty title.) They could probably even get the mayor to put in a good word for him, given the eternal gratitude the man had for them saving his daughter some years back.   
  
“Why on earth not?”   
  
Shrugging, the detective said, “There are others better suited to the job.”   
  
Hanna was fairly certain that wasn't true in the slightest, but he didn't bother fighting the man on it. That would be a little too honest anyway. They finished dinner and clean-up and chatted a little more as the candles ran low, then parted with vague plans to have dinner again in another day or two if something more interesting didn't come up before then. The detective left, closing the door softly behind him, and the cats whined for several minutes afterward, as usual. Hanna wondered if the happiness of his cats was a good enough excuse to get the man to stay more frequently. 

XxXxX  
  
“It seems a strange thing for a man of his status to do,” the detective commented as he followed along at Hanna's shoulder.   
  
“Why? Father Henry is one of my oldest clients. Longest, I mean. I don't think he's  _ that _ old.”   
  
The detective shook his head. “I've always felt the church was supposed to eschew black magic.”   
  
Hanna slowed enough to give his companion a look over his shoulder. “Black magic, white magic. Why should it matter as long as the result is the same? He's got to protect his flock, right?”   
  
“Hmm,” the detective said, a noncommittal noise that didn't sound in the least like 'yes'.   
  
The priest was quite happy to see them, or at least Hanna. The presence of the detective seemed confusing to the man. “A friend of yours?” he asked Hanna while the detective waited down the aisle near the open chapel doors.   
  
“He's my partner,” Hanna told the priest, whose eyebrows inched up his face slightly as the corners of his lips drew down.  
  
“Your partner? The man is an officer, is he not?”   
  
“A detective,” Hanna responded, laughing to himself over the distinction. “Why? Are you worried he'll rat us out? Don't be concerned. He's a good man.”   
  
“How good of a man is he?” Father Henry asked, seeming on edge.   
  
Hanna shrugged. “Very good?”   
  
The answer did not seem to alleviate Father Henry's worry in the slightest. “Yes, well, perhaps we should do any further business in private, if it's all the same to you.”   
  
It  _ wasn't _ all the same to him, but Hanna didn't argue. Father Henry was, after all, a customer and a well-paying one at that, so Hanna simply got to solving whatever his problem was and when he was finished, promised to come alone the next time. He did, however, mention it to the detective after they left.   
  
“I told him that you're reliable, but Father Henry doesn't seem to trust you,” Hanna said, grinning up at his friend with the absurd statement.   
  
“I wouldn't assume so,” the detective responded, looking down his nose at Hanna as if the necromancer were a bit unhinged.   
  
Hanna wrinkled his brow at the statement. It didn't make sense to him. “You  _ expect _ him not to trust you?”   
  
The detective nodded. “If he's smart at all, he will trust no one to know that he associates with you. That his messengers know might be too much.”   
  
“Wait.” Hanna stopped and backed up against an empty stretch of brick wall. He didn't think he could have this conversation and navigate pot-holes at the same time. “Is the problem with Father Henry, or  _ me?” _   
  
Looking like he'd bitten his tongue, the detective shook his head. “It's not a  _ problem, _ that's not what I'm saying. But Hanna, you  _ know _ that black magic is condemned by the church. The Father certainly knows. What does it say about the moral character of a man who goes against the very teachings he dedicates his life to?”   
  
In Hanna's opinion, that was a very hypocritical question. “And what about you? Magic is supposedly a serious crime, but  _ you _ were the one who sought  _ me _ out! What of your dedication to upholding the law?” In all honesty, Hanna knew that was an unfair thing to say, and a daft, dangerous question to ask, lest the detective really analyze their relationship and find that he was more loyal to his job than to Hanna after all. But he could not help saying it, and could barely stop himself from demanding that if the man was going to arrest him, he'd better just get it done with.   
  
“That is an entirely different matter, Hanna,” the detective said, mad and frustrated and remorseful and worried all at once. “It is not the law that drives my opinion of black magic. If I was unsure before, I've seen enough since I met you to know it is not a thing most would consider good.”   
  
For a very short moment, Hanna was quietly stunned. He had thought they were friends, after all they'd been through, all the time they'd spent together. He'd thought they were  _ more. _ Yet here the detective was, saying these things, all but calling Hanna evil. He wondered if the man had felt that way all along. “So the problem  _ is _ me,” he said, frowning the long ways up to the detective from where he'd sunk down defensively into his shoulders. “You should have said so.”   
  
“It is not--” The detective tried to protest, but Hanna was already around the corner. Instead of chasing after him, the man sighed and leaned heavily against the brick wall where the magic user had leaned just a moment before. He closed his eyes and tilted his head up. No divine light shone upon him, but he already knew the answers he needed. He stood there and breathed for several minutes, then pushed himself back into the stream of the busy street and went to buy a pie.   
  
xXxXx  
  
Hanna had managed to stop actively fretting about the argument, but still the words wouldn't leave him alone even as he set himself to various tasks about his apartment that suddenly seemed to need done. Although he wanted to brush it off, there was no use denying that he was hurt. And a bit confused. And annoyed! If the detective had really thought so badly of him, why had he hung around these past years? If he had such a problem with magic, why not stay out of it? It wasn't as if Hanna forced him to come along whenever he had a job. The detective had seemed... curious, at least, if not directly interested. Mostly, Hanna wondered why the man had had such a change of heart.   
  
(No,  _ mostly _ Hanna hated to think of the detective deciding he no longer cared for him.  _ Secondly,  _ his pride made him mad at the man. His question of 'why' was at most a tertiary concern.)   
  
He was still running over the conversation in his head, again and again, by the time the detective knocked on Hanna's door, but at least his apartment was better organized. He thought about waiting there quietly to see if the man let himself in, but the chances were too high that he would leave if not fairly-explicitly invited in, and Hanna always preferred to see him whenever he had the opportunity, despite however mad they might be at each other, so he opened the door.   
  
“Please accept my apologies,” the detective said, handing a fresh-baked pie to Hanna across the threshold. His face was neutral, something Hanna assumed he'd picked up from his police training. Hanna supposed that was better than a pleading expression; it would have looked strange on the man, and they didn't need any more strangeness today.   
  
“Bribery?” Hanna asked. “I thought you were above the sort of tactics your co-workers usually resort to.” He took the pie anyway because it looked as close to perfect as a pastry could. Leaving the door open in invitation, he set the pie down on the stove-top and started to look for plates and cutlery. It was probable that the detective wanted to talk before eating, but that simply wasn't going to happen.   
  
The detective took a small step inside, closing the door behind him. His movements were more quiet even than usual, and the distance he kept between them greater than normal. “I wouldn't stoop that low for anyone else. I hope it shows the lengths I'll go to where you're concerned.” Of course he was partly joking, as buying a pie for someone wasn't exactly a great length, but Hanna knew his jokes were more often more serious than not.   
  
“Well don't,” Hanna said over his shoulder as he cut a very large slice for himself a smaller one for his guest. “Don't break your rules on my account.” He took the plates up and walked over to hand the more modest portion to the detective before going to sit at the table and stuffing his own face. The pie's looks weren't deceiving, it was as delicious as he expected.   
  
“It's not that simple,” the detective said, ignoring the plate in his hand and staring instead at Hanna.   
  
“What isn't simple about it?” Hanna asked, swallowing a large mouthful. If they got back to the point of casually talking again, he'd have to ask the detective where he'd found such a good bakery. “If associating with me goes against your  _ morals, _ then don't do it.”   
  
Sighing, the detective poked at his slice of pie with his fork, though he didn't seem very interested in eating it. “You make it sound so easy. Would you be able to do such a thing?”   
  
“No,” Hanna said. “That's why I don't bother with morals.” He was still mad, but his frown had faded somewhat since he'd begun eating. It was hard to remain entirely upset when you had a warm mouthful of dessert which, of course, the detective had counted on.   
  
Hanna 'not bothering with morals' wasn't true, the detective knew. It was something Hanna claimed of himself, but it was mostly his way of excusing himself from the consequences of difficult situations. Anyone who'd ever been helped by the magic user knew that he cared about people, probably more than the pious sorts who played at altruism. If he was only in it for the money, he could have made an easier living selling poisons or opiates than those deathwards he liked so much. If he was only in it for the money, the detective probably wouldn't have returned after that second time, but here he was several years later, spending at least as much time at Hanna's apartment as his own.   
  
“It must be a simple life you live,” the detective said, humoring Hanna's statement.   
  
Hanna scraped the last bits of pie off his plate. “It could be worse,” he said. “I could be shackled to propriety like you.”   
  
The detective shook his head, almost laughing. “I'm clearly not.” He poked at his pie a little more and came over to the table to sit opposite Hanna without looking up to ask if it was alright that he make himself at home.   
  
“What's the problem then?” Hanna reached his fork over and stole a bit of pastry, though without any of the playfulness that usually accompanied such an action.   
  
“I suppose...” The detective thought about it for a minute, pondering what was really the 'problem' (in a way that Hanna's stubbornness would understand) as he flaked pieces of crust off of his quickly disappearing slice of pie. “I suppose it's that I don't trust magic.”   
  
That seemed a little absurd to Hanna, but he could see that it was true, at least partly. The detective was most content when they were involved in mundane, non-magical cases. Of course, he'd become accustomed to Hanna's use of magic and certainly seemed grateful for it when a case would have been unsolvable otherwise, but he was always a little on edge around magic, acutely aware that things could go wrong at any moment in ways he had no control over. The issue was that every bit of Hanna's life was entangled in magic. To get away from magic, the detective would have to remove Hanna from his life. Even then, there was no guarantee that the nebulous element that was magic wouldn't continue to chase the lingering scent of the necromancer.   
  
“Maybe it's because you don't  _ understand  _ magic,” Hanna said. He had an idea, so he set his fork down and brought his hands together as if to cup a tiny invisible  _ something _ between them.   
  
“I don't think... so,” the detective said, trailing off as he watched a flicker of flame spring up from between Hanna's palms. It wasn't something he'd ever seen Hanna do before, wasn't a type of magic they had any use for in the business of solving murders.   
  
Hanna uncupped his hands to reveal a bright little fire, vibrant red in color. He smiled at it like it was an old friend. “My mentor did this when I first met him. It's supposed to show how strong your magic is. Hold out your hand.” The detective eyed the flame uncertainly. “It's not hot,” Hanna said, demonstrating as he held the fire close, almost crushing it between his hands, running his fingers through the dancing leaves of flame.  
  
Hesitantly, the detective reached out across the small table, presenting his cupped hands. As if it were a fragile little creature, Hanna gently deposited the flame in the crease of the detective's palms. On contact, the red of the flame turned to a neon orange. The detective brought it up before his eyes to study it, but it flickered and shed its little fingers until it was nothing but a glimmer, then blinked out.   
  
“Oh,” Hanna said, frowning at the emptiness of the detective's hands. “That was underwhelming. Well, I guess that's fine. I wouldn't have much of a job if everyone could use magic anyway.”   
  
The detective was a little disappointed despite his distrust, however he didn't describe that conflicting emotion to Hanna. “I'll just have to leave the magic to you.”   
  
Hanna quirked an eyebrow at the man. “Even though you don't trust it?”   
  
“I trust you,” the detective said. “That's enough.”   
  
Neither of them was sure they'd really forgiven each other, or if there was anything to forgive in the first place, but they seemed to be done being at odds. They were better on each other's side, and they both agreed. Hanna got up and cut them second slices of pie. He gave the slightly larger one to the detective, although the gesture was somewhat in vain, as he ended up eating the majority of it anyway, forkfuls playfully stolen while the detective was feigning distraction. It was the thought that mattered, and the detective appreciated it, glad Hanna couldn't hold a grudge.   
  
xXxXx  
  
Some time passed, as it always does. The hectic elections finished and the detective resumed his schedule of visiting Hanna almost daily. Hanna was disappointed in the police force (though not surprised) for their failure to give the detective a promotion, regardless of whether he'd asked for one or not. The detective, however, seemed as content as always in his job and circumstances, holding no ill will towards his superiors. He supported the new police chief with a loyalty Hanna felt  _ he _ could never managed towards a man who'd been given a job he could have done better.   
  
Of course, Hanna tried not to slander the detective's boss and co-workers too much. They must be, he  _ supposed, _ alright sorts of people if the detective continued to work with them. Hanna wasn't quite generous enough to claim that any friend of the detective's was a friend of his, but he figured he could manage civility at the least.   
  
He did find it a bit difficult to be entirely polite, however, when an officer he thought he had probably met maybe once or twice showed up at his door one morning.   
  
“Can I help you?” he asked, wondering what in the world his horrible neighbors or whoever had complained about this time. (Those neighbors really had no room to whine. Hanna's room might smell a bit oddly at times, but at least he didn't have seven hundred children making a racket at all hours of the day.) And since the detective spent so much time at Hanna's apartment, he usually made sure there were no obvious violations or reasons to have the police called on him.   


“Is Johnson here?” the man asked, looking bored. His eyes drifted off into the room behind Hanna, though he didn't seem especially interested in it either.   
  
“I don't know any Johnsons,” Hanna said. “Maybe try next door.”   
  
The officer looked about as annoyed as Hanna felt. “Don't bother playing dumb. Everyone knows about the two of you.”   
  
_ 'Oh,' _ Hanna thought, fighting to keep his face as neutral as possible. It was quite the “oh”, quite a bundle of realizations all wrapped up into one.   
  
“Well he's not here,” he told the officer, crossing his arms to keep them from fidgeting in the wake of his sudden energy. If the pose made him seem uninterested in talking to the officer any longer, that was simply an added benefit. “Why not try, maybe,  _ his _ apartment?”   
  
“This was closer. I'm going there next.”   
  
Without even a 'thank you for your time', the officer turned on his heel and headed back down the hall, giving Hanna one last bored, annoyed look as he left.   
  
Although he wanted to talk to the detective immediately, Hanna waited an hour or so before taking the trip across town to the man's apartment, giving the officer time to conclude his business before Hanna barged in. If the force had sent an officer to look for him, that probably meant the detective hadn't shown up to work that morning, which implied something was wrong because the detective was exceedingly punctual normally. The man likely hadn't had a truant day in his life. Chances were slim that he'd been mugged or anything of the sort, as he was usually armed and quite good at protecting himself. And he probably hadn't gotten into trouble on a case, because he always brought Hanna with him in dangerous or strange situations.   
  
That meant, most likely, the man was sick.   
  
It was rainy that day, a particularly bad day for being ill. (Or a particularly good one, depending on one's preference. Was it better that if you had to be laid up, it be on a gloomy and generally unproductive day? Or was it worse that the weather was cold and uncomfortable when you were already feeling badly?) With no cooking skills of his own, Hanna decided to pick up a bread-bowl of soup to take with him. He and the bread were both a bit soggy by the time they arrived, but he doubted the detective would mind terribly.   
  
He knocked when he came to the door, but didn't wait for long before letting himself in. (Like his own door, the detective's was runed to allow either of them to work the knob.) As expected, the man was laid back on a pile of pillows in his bed. He opened his eyes when he heard the door close, blinking heavily.   
  
Hanna set the bowl down on a little mostly-clear table in the corner, hoping the crust would stay solid enough to hold the soup a while longer. He approached the detective, who was pulling himself into a sitting position. There were quite a few things he wanted to say, ranging from the usual sort of chatter they made when they met up again after a few days to questions of how the other officers knew his address, but what first came out of his mouth was, “I can't believe your name is  _ Johnson _ .”   
  
“Is it not a believable name?” the detective asked, smiling in a tired sort of way. His voice was quite crackly. “More believable than 'Hanna',” he joked.   
  
“Pfft.” Hanna handed the detective his lunch. “Don't worry, I didn't try cooking. I picked it up from Mrs. Abernathy.”   
  
The detective drank the soup dutifully, although Hanna sat a little closer than perhaps necessary, in case the bread-bowl slipped from the man's shaky hands. He would rather not have to do laundry today. He poked around the living space and rearranged pillows and blankets and windows and such whenever the man set the bowl down.   
  
“So is it Johnson Something, or Something Johnson?” he asked a few minutes later, as he idly tidied things in the opposite corner of the small room. (The detective kept his apartment fairly clean, though, so there was not much  _ to _ tidy. Mostly Hanna moved jars and candles and such around more to his liking, although he knew the detective would move them back as soon as he was on his feet.)   
  
Thickly swallowing a small bite of soggy bread, the man responded, “Christopher Johnson.” He said it much the same way one would say they'd taken a pay cut because of the poor economy.   
  
“What an... average name,” Hanna said, struggling to find a non-offensive adjective. It wasn't that he thought it a  _ bad _ name; on any other man it would be fine. But the detective simply didn't seem like a 'Christopher Johnson'. (Admittedly, he didn't seem like anything really else either, in Hanna's opinion.)   
  
The detective nodded, feeling quite the same way. “It was the name of the founder of the orphanage. I'm told he was a good man. I suppose I should feel honored.”   
  
_ 'Ah, right,' _ Hanna thought. He often forgot the man had been an orphan, although he'd mentioned it a few times. Neither of them really talked much about their pasts, not more than an off-hand comment here or there. Hanna was sort of curious, although he was more interested in the person the man was now than the one he'd been before they'd met. Now that he had this little piece of information, though, he could imagine the man's childhood more clearly. The favored child, named after the founder, mild-mannered and obedient, liked by all the adults-- or the child they placed their expectations on, at least. Maybe the luckiest kid in the home... but still an orphan.   
  
“I take it you don't care for it very much?”   
  
He looked a little guilty, but the detective shook his head. “It was just a name they gave me, without any real meaning. I've never felt very connected to it.”   
  
Hanna laughed, perhaps in relief. “Good,” he said, partly joking. “Then you won't mind if I don't suddenly start using it.” Of course, he  _ would _ if the man really wanted him to, but after so long of referring to him in general terms like 'him', 'my partner', or 'my detective friend' (or “hey, officer” on the occasions when he felt like being impetuous), calling him by a proper name would be weird. It would feel like talking to a different person entirely.   
  
“If I'd cared much, I would have mentioned it when I realized you missed my original introduction,” he said, barely making it through the sentence before sneezing violently.   
  
“Which was when?” Hanna asked. He handed the man a handkerchief.   
  
The detective turned away from Hanna and blew his nose. “About a week later,” he said when his throat was a little clearer.   
  
They sat together a while longer in companionable quiet while the detective finished his soup. He gave the bowl to Hanna to finish off when he'd had his fill. Hanna took a large bite of the soup-soaked bread and was in the middle of chewing it when he remembered another of the things he'd meant to ask. “That officer who--” he began with his mouth full, before deciding it just wasn't going to work and taking a moment to swallow. “One of your co-workers came looking for you at my place.”   
  
“He told me,” the detective said. “He said you were suspiciously defensive.”   
  
“Not more than usual,” Hanna clarified.   
  
“I assumed so.”   
  
Hanna took another bite, though a small enough one not to impede their conversation. “When he thought I was pretending not to know you, he said everybody knew about us. What do you, er, what exactly do you tell people?”   
  
The detective looked a little amused. “Nothing much. But you know how people are.”   
  
“Gossips?” Hanna guessed. “Nosy? Judgmental?”   
  
“Word gets around,” the detective said, much more forgiving than Hanna. “Information gets distorted. People make up their own stories.”   
  
“ _ Gossips, _ ” Hanna said. “So, then, what are these stories people are apparently telling?”   
  
The detective shrugged as if he wasn't really bothered by what people might be saying. “I'm not certain. My co-workers know I spend a lot of time with you. That isn't really gossiping.”   
  
Hanna rolled his eyes, a little exasperated, but a little endeared by the detective's nonchalance. “The way that officer said it, it sounded more like everyone was in on some big secret.”   
  
“I believe most of them are aware of your... magical talents,” the detective said. “I've never told them, but they seem to have heard elsewhere.”   
  
Normally, Hanna would consider that level of reputation as a positive thing, but he wasn't particularly comfortable with the entire police force knowing. “Maybe I  _ should _ be a little more discreet,” Hanna said, hesitantly, as his ability to attract customers and make the sometimes obscene amount of money he got from them somewhat hinged on being known. Still, he knew he'd been lucky, enormously lucky that he hadn't gotten into any legal trouble over his use of magic, as it was still prohibited. (It wasn't policed as strictly as other 'vices', but only because most people didn't entirely believe in it.)   
  
“I wouldn't protest such a course of action,” the detective said. Hanna knew how much of an understatement that was. If Hanna was at all cautious, the detective was at least doubly so. “But I don't think your magic is all that much of a concern to them.”   
  
In Hanna's opinion, the detective was too honest for his own good (although just the right amount of honest to be considered as trustworthy as he was). It would have benefited his cause to leave off with that last sentence. “So they aren't worried I'm controlling you for my own profit or political motives or anything?” he asked. That was the usual thought process whenever people took notice of magic users and saw that they weren't totally friendless and poor, as if foul play was the only way to accomplish one's goals.   
  
“I doubt it,” the detective answered. “Officers of my rank aren't influential enough for that to be a concern.”   
  
If he'd been promoted, however, it would probably be a different story. He didn't say it outright, but suddenly Hanna realized just why his hardworking companion never bothered to reach any higher. It hadn't made a bit of sense before. Nobody else was more worthy and yet less ambitious. It had frustrated Hanna before, but now it just made him feel... warm. Maybe, he thought, he should have felt bad about being the reason the detective was living in such a tiny apartment when he could be making so much more money, but instead he only felt extremely pleased.   
  
He looked at the man, who was unaware of the sort of garden blooming in Hanna's head. He looked sleepy and as content as one could be while still ill. The man was gracious. Never once had he been unwilling to share with Hanna every little thing he had, even if all he had was that little. He was a sort of impossible that was making more sense with every second that passed. He was composure, while the redhead floundered around in what he thought he knew, and yet he held no ill will towards the mess of Hanna's life. He  _ cared. _ It was impossible, but Hanna understood now just  _ how much _ he cared.   
  
They were just sitting together now, but this was good. Hanna had said something in response to the detective's last comment, something that didn't have a thing to do with what was charging wildly yet gently through his head. He didn't even remember what it was that had come out of his mouth. But now they were sitting, quietly. This was what he wanted. This, and honesty.   
  
“Since we were on the topic of names, did I ever mention I was apparently named after a famous general?”  
  
Already half asleep, the detective chuckled. “I'm not familiar with any generals named Hanna,” he said, cracking an eye open to look at Hanna for just a moment.   
  
“Neither am I,” Hanna told him. It wasn't a perfect honesty, but it was what he could handle for now. There was no guarantee the detective would remember this when he properly awoke anyway.   
  
“Hmm,” was the detective's sleepy response, the last conscious noise he made for at least the next hour.   
  
Hanna stayed another while, even though his friend was fast asleep. He looked peaceful in his resting state, so Hanna left him to it, even though there was so much he wanted to say. Chances were, he'd be unable to get the words out anyway, a rarity for him but a real possibility with words this new, this potent. So he didn't wake the man, and yet he couldn't bring himself to leave. It was not his house, no; he would go eventually, and they would meet up again as soon as the detective was well. But he found himself thinking that he'd like to have fewer meetings, that they could have fewer partings, less leaving and arriving, more staying.   
  
There was really no reason to have two apartments. It was a waste of money and the precious time it took to get from one to the other. As mentioned by the officer earlier, Hanna's home was closer to the police station anyway. It had everything he needed for his job, and his cats, and a larger living area, and a more desirable location. It was missing only the detective, a problem which Hanna seeked to rectify.   
  
Perhaps, he thought, he would mention it next time, a suggestion in the guise of a seedling of thought. Or maybe he would be bold and force the words out in their truest form. Now that it was all becoming plain to him, he wanted quite badly to confess in words ever clearer all the nebulous swirls of emotion from his past.   
  
But, not tonight. Tonight the detective needed sleep, and Hanna needed to respect those needs. So he tidied up, moved at least one trinket back to where the detective preferred, and left with just the shortest of overwhelmingly fond looks back.   
  
Hanna was not tired, having slept some days ago; but he thought he might try rest again tonight. Time until they could meet again was only crawling by, so Hanna thought perhaps he would fill it with dreams.   



	7. Chapter 7

Hanna's first thought when he woke was that all this alternating between waking and dreaming was sort of tedious, and he didn't know how he'd done it so frequently back in the day or how anybody else managed. His second thought was surprise that there was a zombie sitting on the floor a few feet away, using his laptop. He wasn't surprised about the zombie thing, just the fact that the man was hunt-and-pecking at the keyboard as if everything was normal. Hanna supposed it _could_ be normal, and that was a nice third thought to have.  
  
“Heya, Napoleon,” Hanna said, a little drowsy still. “I guess you figured out how to work that thing?”  
  
“Eventually,” Napoleon responded, looking pleased with himself.  
  
The last time Hanna had touched the computer was over a week ago, but it was the middle of the month, so the neighbors with the unsecured wi-fi most likely hadn't moved out yet. “Did you discover the internet?”  
  
The zombie didn't look up from his tapping, apparently concentrating quite hard. “I discovered the Google.”  
  
Hanna wasn't sure if he should be worried. “Learn anything interesting?” he asked.  
  
“Everything is interesting when you don't remember much,” Napoleon said, finishing with whatever he was slowly typing and looking up at Hanna. He seemed happy, mouth set to a content almost-smile. “And I don't remember much.”  
  
Again, Hanna's glasses were set to the side of the mattress, even though he didn't remember taking them off. If this was a subconscious habit he'd gotten into, he didn't mind; the number of times he'd accidentally crushed or bent his glasses in his sleep was ridiculous. Sure, he could fix them pretty easily, but it was just simpler not to have to. He put them back on and sat up more properly, straightening his clothes a little. “Nothing ringing any bells?”  
  
Napoleon shook his head. “Nothing from the past century of history.”  
  
That was no surprise to Hanna; you couldn't remember what you'd never known in the first place. He was a little curious though... Did the zombie remember _anything?_ Obviously he remembered how to talk and other basic functions, but did he recall anything about the world? “What about, like... Jesus?”  
  
“I do remember him,” Napoleon replied, raising an eyebrow like Hanna had just told a bad joke. “I remember some things. Names of countries. Constellations. Months of the year.”  
  
“Gosh, with knowledge like that, you could've been a professor,” Hanna said, laughing.  
  
The zombie huffed an empty breath in amusement. “I'm sure more will come back to me in time.”  
  
While that was a nice prospect for his poor amnesiac friend, Hanna wasn't so sure how he felt about it, partly because he still wasn't entirely sure how the whole memory-loss thing worked. “Yeah, I bet it will,” he said, because it was probably true. If he remembered constellations, he'd probably remember all the other junk people learned while they were growing up. But would he remember stuff that was relevant to his personal life? If he started to recall the ranks and routines of police officers, would he remember that he _was_ one? Would he remember the time when he asked that necromancer for help solving a case? Would he remember how much time they spent together in the following years? Or would that all be a big blank space while the rest of it filled in?  
  
And on top of all that, the question: was Hanna going to let his companion remember at his own pace and risk being caught in a lie, or was he going to come clean before it could all catch up to him? He still wasn't sure.  
  
It seemed like Napoleon was comfortable where he was (and he'd probably been there all night, if he'd had the time to figure out how to work a laptop for the first time _and_ catch up on a hundred years of history), but Hanna was hoping to change clothes, so he let the zombie in on a little tech knowledge. “Hey, you can take that in the living room if you want. Just unplug the cord from the side there.”  
  
“Oh,” the zombie said. “Alright. Thank you.” He pulled the plug gently and stood from his spot against the wall, giving Hanna just a short nod before relocating himself probably to the unfortunately lumpy couch.  
  
Really, Hanna could have just taken his clothes to the bathroom, but he didn't feel like watching himself undress. Catching glimpses of his own shirtlessness from the corners of his vision was more than enough. (And showering was a _nightmare._ He did it with his eyes closed most of the time. Luckily, though, he resisted dirt these days as much as aging, so it was only when a fairy knocked him into a mud puddle or something that showering was really necessary.)  
  
As soon as he was into some fresh clothes (again, not really something he needed to do for cleanliness's sake, just a habit), he rejoined Napoleon in the living room. His friend had taken Hanna's cue, apparently, and decided to totally avoid the actual couch cushions; he was perched on the arm where he'd sat the past few nights. It was a weirdly casual thing to see him doing when not actively mimicking Hanna. Neither of them had ever had a couch back in the day, so whether or not he would have taken to sitting like that while alive would forever be a mystery.  
  
“I was thinking,” the zombie began before Hanna could go to the trouble of trying to think of something to say, “that I might have had some connection to magic in my life.”  
  
“What makes you say that?” Hanna asked, sure to sound as neutral as possible about any of Napoleon's ideas.  
  
“It feels very familiar,” he said. “The spells you've done, I almost felt like I knew them. Could I have been a magic-user?”  
  
Hanna's first instinct was to respond with a derisive snort, but he was careful not to let it out. “Uh, yeah, I guess that's a possibility.”  
  
Napoleon seemed a little excited about the prospect. “Is there any way of knowing?”  
  
There was _one_ way that was extremely easy, but Hanna wasn't going to go that route today... at least, not right now. Not right now. “There's this, well, this test I used to use sometimes. I don't think it'll work, but we could try it.” The zombie nodded, so Hanna humored him and pulled up a little flame between his palms. “Don't worry, it's not hot,” he said when his companion's eyes widened far past their recent sleepy thinness. He passed it back and forth between his hands, the vibrant red twinkling brightly. Then he held it out to the zombie, who took it with only the slightest hesitation. They watched as it flickered steadily in Napoleon's palm. He stared at it a minute before brushing it with his thumb and running his fingers through it. It didn't change at all, not in size or color or intensity.  
  
“What does it mean?”  
  
“Uh... I don't know.” Truly, he didn't. This certainly hadn't been the result when they'd tried the same trick before. Why in the world would the man have developed a stronger magic _after_ he died? And why would his magic now be the same color as Hanna's? Maybe... “Ah, wait, give it back!”  
  
Hanna took the flame back and watched just long enough to make sure it stayed the same when it changed hands, then dropped it on the table. It fizzled out as sure as if he'd dropped it in water. “Well.”  
  
Napoleon was watching curiously, but not pushing for an answer, which was good because Hanna didn't exactly have one. At least, there was a little bit of one poking at the back of his brain, but he didn't like it so he wasn't going to share it. He'd been hoping the zombie was just acting like an inanimate object when he held the flame, but that couldn't be the case if it extinguished itself on the table. No, the flame was fueled by a person's magical life force. And, you know, considering that, the undead man shouldn't have been able to fuel the fire at all, right? That was what Hanna decided then and there, anyway.  
  
“Okay, so, um, I guess you've got pretty strong magic?”  
  
“Is that odd?” Napoleon asked, not oblivious to Hanna's confusion.  
  
Hanna nodded sideways. “Yyyeah, it sorta is. I mean, undead can't usually really _do_ magic,” he sort-of lied. He'd never _known_ any undead magic users, and theoretically they shouldn't be able to do magic... _probably_ . (Aside from like vampires turning into bats and all that; it was magic _al_ , but Hanna didn't think it really counted as magic.)  
  
“Peculiar,” the zombie said.  
  
“You're tellin' _me_ .”  
  
Honestly, though... It wasn't as peculiar as he wished it was. It was just another reason to believe Ples, because if the reaper was right, then maybe this wasn't weird at all. But how was he going to explain that? (Answer: it would be very easy to explain!) He wasn't going to. Instead, Hanna was just going to sit there and worry some more about things getting out of hand and the zombie not only piecing his past together but piecing it together _wrong._ Apparently.  
  
It was quiet after that, for a little while, while the zombie followed links from one thing to another on Wikipedia. Hanna thought about doing the dishes he'd promised to get to, but he didn't feel like it. There was a pile of laundry that needed doing too, but he'd have to take it to the laundromat and they probably didn't have time to guarantee both the wash and dry cycles could finish. (And you really didn't want to leave your clothes in an unlocked machine if you weren't there to supervise them. No matter how ratty they were, they _would_ be gone when you got back.)  
  
“Hey, what time is it anyway?” he asked, leaning over toward the computer. “Uh, right there in the bottom-right corner.”  
  
“Two-thirty six,” the zombie replied, although it was almost a question. Hanna wondered if he was marveling at the digital clock. “We agreed to meet Veser at five o'clock, right?”  
  
Hanna scooted a bit closer, leaving his side-arm perch and sitting on the back of the couch instead.“Yup. Is there anything you wanna do 'til then?” He remembered his decision from several nights ago (which he kept changing his mind about back and forth but was currently favoring) that he intended to start over with the zombie, which implied attempting to make them something like what they had been before, just new. It wasn't as if they really went on dates or anything back in the day, but they did go out and _do_ stuff sometimes instead of just sitting around at either of their houses. Besides, if _he_ was Napoleon, he'd be bored stiff (oh look at that, a rigor mortis joke) just following Hanna on mundane jobs and not getting to really do anything else.  
  
The zombie shook his head. (He tilted it back and forth a little.) “Nothing in particular,” he said. “What do you usually do?”  
  
What did Hanna do? Nothing worth making a date out of, or even a friendly... bro outing. Mostly what he did was wallow in his own self-pity, subsequently losing whole weeks at a time. Alternately, he pestered Worth. But they'd already bothered the doctor recently, and wallowing was kind of a one-person activity (one he hoped not to be doing much of from this point on). “Uh, nothing really. I just... sit around here, I guess.”  
  
“Then that's fine.”  
  
Hanna scoffed. “What? That is not _fine_ , that's _boring_ . I really feel like we should do something. Aren't you bored?”  
  
Napoleon gave Hanna a look that he wanted to call 'endeared', but it might just as well have been exasperation at Hanna's silliness. “I'm not bored. Whatever you want to do is fine.”  
  
In return, Hanna gave his friend a look that was definitely both endeared and exasperated. “You're so easy you're _difficult._ But I guess if you don't care, then, I dunno, you wanna go to the park or something?”  
  
“The park?” An odd suggestion, apparently. (Though what would have been better? The movies? A cafe? Not when they were both about as poor as dirt and one of them couldn't eat.)  
  
Hanna scratched a hand through his hair. He could swear it was curlier today, maybe from the rain the previous night or something. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “I mean, it's a nice day, and there's a park really close to the college, so, y'know, we could just head out early and hang out there. We could people-watch.”  
  
At that, Napoleon nearly laughed. “ _People_ -watch? Are people interesting enough to watch?” (Clearly, people-watching was not a concept he was familiar with. Hanna remembered they had people-watched plenty back in the day; they just hadn't called it that or declared that they were doing it.)  
  
“Near a college campus? Oh yeah.”  
  
It seemed that the zombie was not entirely sure he believed Hanna (that any people were interesting enough to watch _or_ that doing so was an actual activity that anyone purposefully did), but as always, he put his trust in the redhead's decision and followed along, content.  
  
“We don't have to go yet, if you're still reading,” Hanna said.  
  
Napoleon didn't seem to mind. “History will still be here when we return,” he replied, deliberately clicking through the options to shut down the computer. He waited patiently for the old, unhurried operating system to finish up before closing the lid and setting it aside far more gently than Hanna ever did.  
  
So they headed out into the hazy daylight, pockets empty but for their hands. Since they were mostly planning to rely on Veser for whatever magic it was they needed today, Hanna didn't bother bringing any ingredients or tools, except for his Sharpie, which he basically always had on him. (And this time, it was alone in his pocket. After the previous night, he decided to ditch the switch-blade at home. He didn't need the temptation, or the reminder.)  
  
At this time of day, not many people were out walking, so Napoleon avoided being stared at too much, at least until they neared the busy little bit of town surrounding the school. However, the attention the zombie received near the college was more along the lines of laughter and appreciative nods than weirded-out double-takes, probably because the students assumed his appearance was an elaborate costume. College towns were fun that way. (Though, he still seemed a little uncomfortable being looked at so much, and who could blame him? Hanna got stared at sometimes just for being ginger, and that was awkward enough.)  
  
They came to the park after a bit more walking, and slowed to a casual stroll as Napoleon looked around. Parks were something they didn't really have way back when. Well, they'd had organized plots of greenery in the upper part of town, and there was plenty of actual wilderness outside of town, but no playgrounds or anything like that. Probably the zombie of a adult man wasn't going to be totally psyched about a playground, but in Hanna's opinion, it was still a positive development in general park decor. Napoleon did seem pleased though. It would have been hard _not_ to be. Even without the park, this area was a hell of a lot prettier than the part of the city Hanna's apartment was in. Heck, there were _trees,_ and _flowers._ It was practically the garden of Eden in comparison, just with more clothes.  
  
(Although, to be fair, they _were_ right next to the college and the dorms; there was definitely the occasional streaker to be found here.)  
  
They wandered the smooth concrete paths for a few minutes, looking for some place to sit where they could observe the majority of the park. (Hanna was looking for a place, though the zombie had already begun observing in earnest.) After some few minutes and a detour into the nicely-manicured grass, they found a spot on a short brick wall under some trees where they could overlook most of the rest of the park and see the edges of the campus in the distance. Hanna hopped up onto the wall (it was short, yeah, but not that short), and Napoleon joined him with little effort.  
  
There were some children jumping around on the playground equipment across the way, and Hanna watched the zombie watch them.  
  
“You wanna go play?” Hanna asked, mostly joking, although not entirely opposed to utilizing jungle gyms when they weren't already occupied by their intended audience.  
  
“I'm content here,” Napoleon responded. “Though they do look like they're enjoying themselves.”  
  
It was kind of bittersweet to Hanna, though more sweet than bitter by far. “Yeah. Kids these days get to have a lot of fun.”  
  
“As opposed to when you were a child?” the zombie asked, turning to lock one of his faintly-glowing orange eyes on Hanna.  
  
“Ehh.” There was a little bug crawling around on Napoleon's neck, so Hanna reached over and flicked it off. “My childhood wasn't _all_ bad or anything, but yeah, we definitely didn't have playgrounds back then. Or parks at all. Fields. I had wheat fields.”  
  
Napoleon cocked his head a bit. “Then do _you_ want to go play?”  
  
The funniest thing about that was how much the zombie wasn't joking (about 90%). “Pfft, nah,” Hanna said, ducking his head to hide his stupid grin. (He was imagining the two of them on the teeter-totter. Maybe later, he thought.) “Ah, besides, we came here to people-watch.”  
  
So, people-watch they did, pointing out when a kid did a risky jump off the higher part of the slide or a teenager with cool hair walked past or a businessman started arguing loudly with someone on his phone, making an answerless guessing game out of them all. Despite his relative cluelessness about modern technology and lifestyles, Napoleon was good at the game. Of course, they had no way of knowing if the stories they weaved about each passerby was even remotely true, but they seemed plausible enough, and kept them occupied until a kid on a razor scooter nearly tumbled headfirst over his handlebars in his haste to stop when he noticed them.  
  
“Woah! Are you a zombie?!” he asked, his mouth hanging open as he dropped his scooter and stumbled over.  
  
“Uh...” Napoleon stared at the kid, then stared at Hanna, obviously unsure how to answer such a bold question. Hanna didn't let him flounder long before jumping in.  
  
“He's a zombie alright!” he said confidently. “Pretty cool, huh?”  
  
The kid certainly seemed to think so, given how quickly he called for his friends. Within moments, they were surrounded by a flock of curious children.  
  
“Wow, a real zombie!”  
  
“Do you eat brains?!”  
  
“How did you die?”  
  
“Have you watched The Walking Dead?”  
  
A few of the younger ones hid at the back of the crowd, caught between wanting to see and wanting to flee, and a few more had already run off back to their parents, some of which joined the kids in their admiration.  
  
“Impressive makeup skills.”  
  
“Did Halloween come early this year?”  
  
Hanna did his best to come up with answers for all the children first, though they seemed like a never-ending source of wonderment. After a few minutes of being overwhelmed, Napoleon caught on to the general gist of the story Hanna had come up with about him and began to add a little input here and there. The children seemed to have their fill after ten or so minutes and started to wander off back to their games, though several of the adults hung around a bit longer.  
  
“That's pretty detailed,” a young mother said, holding her curious toddler and leaning closer to the zombie's face for a better look. “Do you guys go to the college?”  
  
“Oh, nah, not us,” Hanna said, shaking his head. “We've just got some friends there. We're waiting on them to get out of class so we can work on a project together.”  
  
The rest of the crowd cleared out in the next few minutes, most with friendly waves goodbye, and Hanna found he felt inexplicably light-hearted. Sure it wasn't exactly a normal, honest way of living, but it was nice to see his friend could still get around just fine in today's supposedly magic-less world.  
  
Napoleon was less sure about the situation. “Are people really so used to the undead that you can be that casual about it?”  
  
Hanna laughed. “Oh, gosh, no, not really. The thing is, nobody really believes in magic and stuff like that, even if it's right in front of them. Those parents thought you were in costume.”  
  
“And the children?”  
  
“ _They_ believed it, sure! But that's, y'know, that's just what kids are like, right?”  
  
Another ten or twenty minutes passed by as they sat, before Hanna decided to ask one of their new friends what the time was. “Four forty-two,” the woman told them, so they left the park and headed across the street to the edges of the campus.  
  
“I actually have no idea where Veser's gonna be,” Hanna admitted. He considered asking one of the students rushing around, but they all looked so busy that he didn't want to bother them. Eventually, a few came up to express their admiration for the rad zombie makeup, and Hanna inquired about Veser to them, but none of them recognized the name. He and Napoleon ended up wandering around for the next twenty minutes or so, continuing their people-watching game, until Veser found them.  
  
“Okay, I probably should've got your cell-phone number,” he said, looking like he might have just ran around the whole campus trying to find them.  
  
Hanna shrugged in apology. “I don't actually have a phone, but telling us what building your class was in probably would have worked too.”  
  
Veser straightened up and fixed his backpack straps. “Yeah, well. Hope you weren't waiting too long,” he said, though he didn't seem too worried about inconveniencing them. “I need to go drop my stuff off at home before we go anywhere else, so come on.” He began to lead the way without any more pleasantries, and they followed him out into the clean residential streets nearer to the coast.  
  
“So what class did you have?” Hanna asked as they walked, figuring a little small-talk couldn't hurt, unless, of course, Veser was one of those teenagers who was violently opposed to socializing with people they didn't totally like, in which case, it could hurt a little.  
  
The teen looked over his shoulder. “Economics,” he responded. “Boring as hell class, but Lee wants me to get a degree in something useful.”  
  
“Lee? Is that...?”  
  
“My uncle,” Veser said. “I live with him.”  
  
It didn't seem that Veser wanted to talk much more, so Hanna went back to chatting at Napoleon as they wove through neighborhoods of nice little single-story cookie-cutter homes and neat townhouses. They were approaching a community of duplexes when Veser stopped.  
  
“Look, no offense, but can you wait back here?” he asked. “My uncle's not, like, in the best place right now, and seeing a fucking zombie might be a little too much for him.”  
  
“Sure, sure,” Hanna said, waving Veser off and finding a nice spot by a bus-stop sign to wait with Napoleon. The two of them watched from the corners of their eyes as Veser picked out the right path of a duplex down the block a bit and took the stone steps to the door two at a time. A blond man came to the door as he was unlocking it, and the worried look on the teen's face was evident even from this distance. Hanna turned away as Veser embraced the man, feeling guilty at spying on a moment like that.  
  
It was a few minutes before Veser returned unladen. He gave them a serious look, maybe in response to something lingering on Hanna's expression. It was clear he knew they'd witnessed his tenderness, but he wasn't embarrassed. “His mind is fragile right now,” he told them. “He's still recovering.”  
  
“Huh. From what?” Hanna asked, hoping it wasn't too personal to ask about.  
  
It _was_ personal, but Veser responded matter-of-factly, like a doctor with too little heart left to bleed every time he had to tell some bad news or justify his failures. “From being brought back to life. The reason I'm working for the reaper.” He looked hard at Hanna, as if daring him to judge, but the redhead had nothing to say, so Veser just continued his story as he turned and led them away from the neighborhood.  
  
“Lee's like a father to me,” he said, trudging along with his hands in his pockets and not checking to make sure they were following. “I couldn't let him die. Y'know, I... They found his body strung up like he hung himself, like it was a suicide, but I know it wasn't. I kept seeing his ghost, and then I met the reaper. I offered my life if he'd bring Lee back, but he didn't want it, so I told him I'd work for him. Then, you know. That's where we are.”  
  
“Geez.” Hanna wasn't sure what to say to all of that. He hadn't really expected such a genuinely sad story, but he guessed it sort of figured; he didn't think a reaper would take an assistant under any less of an extreme situation. “That's, uh, rough.”  
  
“Mm.” Veser continued on down the gently sloping streets, quiet for a few moments as his footsteps slowed ever so slightly. “I'll do whatever I have to do though. Even if I have to work for Ples for the rest of my life. Lee's life is worth it.”  
  
“How long do you think it's gonna take to pay it off?” Hanna asked. To be honest, he wasn't sure how much a soul was worth. Or was it the service of putting the soul back in his body that he was paying for?  
  
Veser shrugged, but his shoulders didn't fully come back down. “I dunno. I didn't ask. It could be forever. I don't really care, as long as Lee's okay.”  
  
Despite his words, the teenager sounded a little bitter, sort of like he had the evening before. Hanna didn't blame him. It was like, even if you were more than willing to sacrifice everything to save someone you loved, it didn't mean you weren't going to still be a little pissed about it sometimes. “So I guess you sort of hate Ples then, huh?”  
  
“Nah,” Veser said, shaking his head almost apathetically, like he just didn't have it in him. “He's an alright guy. I'm really grateful to him.” To Hanna's surprise, no 'but' followed, no further grumbling. Veser was serious, and sincere.  
  
The breeze off the ocean was all that filled the space between their footsteps for the next few minutes. “Where're we going anyway?” Hanna asked when he noticed the sun glinting off the water not too far in the distance.  
  
Veser gestured to an iron gate between two stone pillars at the end of the next block. “The cemetery,” he said. “Ples said to go somewhere I could get a better link to death.”  
  
The cemetery wasn't busy (not that cemeteries usually were). Only a few people were around, too caught up in their own sorrow to care or notice the zombie and his friends who came to stand around a clean headstone labeled “Hatch”. Veser knelt in the dirt and stared at the double-wide marker.  
  
Hanna stood to one side, Napoleon on the other. The stone looked almost brand new, although the ground around it was fairly undisturbed, the grass and weeds some years older. It was clear that no digging had been done here any time recently. (This was obvious to Hanna, who could still tell how long a person had been buried just by the growth around the grave.)  
  
“My mom and dad,” Veser explained, answering the question that hadn't been asked. “They're empty, though. The graves. They disappeared a couple months ago, right around the time Lee... y'know. It hasn't been long enough to declare them legally dead, but I don't expect to ever see them again.”  
  
“Did you ask Ples?” Hanna suggested. The reaper could almost certainly find out if the teen's parents were still in the world of the living, if he wasn't already aware.  
  
Veser shook his head, looking a little disgusted. “No. Doesn't matter if they've got corpses or not; to me, they're dead.”  
  
“Sorry,” Hanna said, though he wasn't sure what he was apologizing about: the uncertain fate of Mr. and Mrs. Hatch, or the fact that they were apparently shitty enough parents that their son couldn't bring himself to care.  
  
“Don't be.” Veser glared at the headstone a little longer, until the sun had sunk low enough in the sky to shine brightly into his iridescent eyes. “Let's do this,” he said, gesturing for the zombie to sit opposite him in front of the grave.  
  
The quiet echo of the waves played a gentle background music as they sat there in the grass by the empty grave. Veser stared hard at the zombie, breathing as steadily as he could. “I dunno,” he said after a few minutes. “I'm not getting anything.” He closed his eyes in a bid for better concentration, but it only seemed to frustrate him. “I don't think it's gonna work here,” he admitted. “There's just nothing to grab on to, I guess.”  
  
There were plenty of dead people, but Hanna guessed Veser needed something relevant to him. “Is there anywhere else we can go?” he asked, even though he was still skeptical about this whole thing. “Wanna try a morgue or something?”  
  
Veser scowled. “A morgue? Dude, what is wrong with you?” As entrenched as he had become in this weird supernatural world of death, the teen clearly still wasn't used to it enough to consider a morgue a reasonable suggestion. (Hanna had been a little uneasy the first time too, but it was possible to become used to any uncomfortable situation when there was money to be made there.) “No,” Veser said. “I think I know where to go.”  
  
By the time they left the cemetery, the sun had disappeared beneath the horizon, casting only the faintest glow into the deepening purple of the sky. The streetlights here illuminated the sidewalks smoothly and clearly, unlike ninety percent of the ones Hanna was familiar with. A chilly breeze blew off the ocean and gently pushed them back inland. Hanna and Napoleon followed the reaper's assistant back into town, past the tidy duplex and the mostly-idle school, into the city streets nearer to their apartment.  
  
Under the cover of the shadows, they traveled undisturbed and un-stared-at until Veser came to a stop.  
  
“What's this place?” Hanna asked, looking up at the old building, parts of which were boarded up.  
  
“It's a theater,” Veser said, staring into the abyss of a dark window a story up, which looked as if it had been sealed at one point. “It's where Lee... was, when I found him.”  
  
“ _You_ found him? Geez.” Hanna cringed, his sympathy for the kid growing by the minute. Veser didn't respond. He seemed almost in a trance as he went around the front of the theater and found an unlocked entrance to the side of the main double-doors.  
  
The theater was neither busy nor entirely empty, judging by the lights shining through the gaps in the access doors and the faint noise in the background. When they passed an open doorway from the dark hallway to the seating area, they could see that the stage was half lit for an apparent practice performance by a group of young people around their age (or Veser's age, at least).  
  
One of the performers noticed them when they lingered slightly. “Hey! This is a private practice!” he yelled, ready to jump off the stage and accost the trespassers.  
  
Before Hanna or Veser could think of a quick excuse, a girl they recognized turned to them.  
  
“Oh, hey!” Toni called, hopping down from her spot on the stage and trotting over to them. She waved her companions back. “They're friends of mine,” she explained, halting the angry young man, who staggered back a step. “Gimme a sec!”  
  
The other performers nodded their acceptance and returned slowly to their production, while Toni joined the trio in the hall.  
  
“Mr. Cross! I didn't expect to see you here. And your partner too. Hi,” she said, waving hello to Napoleon, who responded in kind. “What's going on?” Toni turned and regarded Veser curiously.  
  
Hanna smiled cheerfully at the girl. As unexpected as it was, it was nice to see her again. She'd been a pretty ideal client. “We're working on another case,” he explained. “Sort of. My friend Veser's helping us out.”  
  
“Hey,” Veser said in greeting, looking a little charmed by the presence of the werewolf girl.  
  
Toni stared at Veser a moment, before a light went on in her head. “Hmm. Oh! You're that guy from a couple months ago, aren't you? When they found that body?”  
  
Toni seemed confused, but Veser was shocked. “What? How do you remember that?”  
  
The question (which bordered on an accusation) didn't help the girl's confusion. “Um, I dunno,” she said. “The rest of my group had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned it a few days later, and you'd think it'd be kind of hard to forget, with all those police and everything. I _thought_ something was up.” She turned to Hanna for an answer. “Was that you?”  
  
“Nobody was supposed to remember,” Veser said. He turned to Hanna as well, hoping the magic-user might have an explanation.  
  
Hanna held up his hands in defense of Veser's intensity and Toni's uncertainty. “What are you looking at me for? I wasn't there. I don't even really know what you're talking about.”  
  
“Ples said it was supposed to be like it never happened,” Veser told him, still sounding a bit hostile. “All the police, all the paperwork, all the witnesses were supposed to forget.”  
  
Well now, wasn't that convenient, Hanna thought. Reapers really were like gods when it came to bringing people back. If _he_ permanently resurrected someone, there'd be a hell of a lot of explaining to do.  
  
Though, apparently, even gods could make mistakes.  
  
“Uh, maybe it's because--” He looked at Toni. “'Cuz you're, y'know,” he said, careful with her secret as if it were his own. He didn't want to out her as a supernatural without her permission.  
  
The girl looked between Veser and Hanna, and Hanna and the zombie, and seemed to come to the conclusion that anyone who was friends with the magic-user could probably be trusted with her sort of secret. “Because I'm a werewolf,” she told Veser, though it was clear she still wasn't sure what that might have to do with her being excluded from this forced memory-loss.  
  
Veser was not exactly stunned by that new information, but he didn't know what to say as he was apparently caught up weighing Toni against all the hairy monsters he'd grown up seeing in movies and wondering what she looked like during a full moon, probably, so Hanna took the initiative and tried to explain a little better to the confused wolf-girl. “His boss is a reaper, and he brought his uncle back to life. Veser's uncle, that is. That was the guy you saw that day, I guess. He probably didn't account for any supernaturals being there. I mean, the reaper.”  
  
“So what, though?” Veser asked, rejoining the conversation. “What difference does it make?”  
  
“Spells work differently on werewolves and other magical people,” Toni explained. “You're not already...?”  
  
Hanna shook his head, though Toni was still regarding Veser curiously, like something was more different about him than they knew. “Nah, Veser's apparently normal,” he told her. “Aside from working for a reaper.”  
  
“I never said that.” Veser scowled at Hanna (a little). It was hard to tell exactly what this kid was thinking, but right now he seemed offended to have been called 'normal'. “But yeah. Most of this magic crap is new to me. Uh, not that it's like... all bad or anything,” he amended, far more for Toni's benefit than either of the investigators'.  
  
“I know it can be a little confusing,” Toni said kindly. “Still though, what are you guys _here_ for? Is it anything I can help with?”  
  
Hanna was fairly certain it wasn't. He didn't think it was really anything anyone could help with, but Veser's eyes lit up (not _literally_ , but so close as makes no difference, his eyes were already so neon) at the mention of getting help from a pretty girl.  
  
“Oh, yeah, maybe,” he said, suddenly sounding much more excited about the job than he had before. “I'm tryin' to read this guy's soul,” he told her, gesturing to the zombie, “so we can see who like, raised him from the dead or whatever.”  
  
Toni looked at Hanna and raised her eyebrows in an animated way, one way up there and the other just a bit lower. “It wasn't _you_ ?” she asked, surprised that her assumption was wrong. (Though it wasn't quite fair to call it an assumption; perhaps intuition was a better word for the way werewolves often knew things without being told.)  
  
“Man, why does everybody think that?” Hanna asked, although honestly it didn't take much imagination to reason out _why_ .  
  
The wolf-girl looked embarrassed. “Sorry. You guys just seem so, um...”  
  
Hanna knew what she wasn't saying: ' _My werewolf intuition says you're intimately familiar with each other, and I'm not used to my intuition being wrong._ ' He felt a little bad not clearing it up for her, but at this point, honesty with Toni was fairly low on the list of his priorities, no matter how much he liked the girl.  
  
“It's okay,” Hanna said with a casual shrug. It certainly wasn't the first time a werewolf had made assumptions about the two of them (and potentially been a little bit right).  
  
It seemed Toni didn't want to dwell on her 'mistake' any longer. She turned her attention to Veser, ready to help however she could. “So you came here to boost your power?” she guessed, having mostly put the plan together by now.  
  
“Something like that,” Veser said. That was it exactly, in layman’s terms, but he probably didn't want to give away all his mystery so suddenly.  
  
The spot they needed was up on the second floor somewhere. Toni ran back to check in with her crewmates, most of whom were packing up for the night anyway. Then she joined the investigators as they followed Veser up the stairs that wound behind the stage.  
  
The rooms back here were all cluttered and didn't look like they'd been used much for some time, but they lacked the telltale signs of squatters and vandals that most truly abandoned buildings in the area showed.  
  
“Most of these rooms were closed off until a while ago,” Toni mentioned. “I think when the police came through they opened them all up. I guess your boss forgot to fix that too, huh?” Veser didn't bother defending the reaper.  
  
They came to the room that (if Hanna was correct) Veser had been staring up at from the street. The light from the auditorium didn't reach this far down the hall, so the room was lit only by the ambient glow of the streetlights outside the unshuttered window, and the faint orange radiance of Napoleon's eyes, which only served to cast his face in eerie shadow. Toni flipped a switch near the door, and a few long fluorescent bulbs flickered to life in the high ceiling. It seemed Veser hadn't needed the light to know where he was going; though there was no evidence of any disturbance at all, he had found his way with soft steps to the middle of the room, a spot under some low rafters.  
  
He looked up. “It was here,” he said, taking a deep breath. “...I think it's gonna work. I can feel it already.” He studied the room for a minute, impressively able to focus on the job at hand rather than dwell on what had happened or unhappened here. Though, Hanna could see the moment his demeanor changed from determined to distracted, when the teen glanced back at Toni. He didn't let his eyes linger more than a second before addressing Hanna instead (or at least turning to him in the hopes that it would look like it was the redhead he was talking to). “So maybe we should all, uh, hold hands. Like to channel the energy.”  
  
_'Classic,'_ Hanna thought, laughing to himself. In all honesty, it wasn't likely that holding hands would have much of an effect on a magic like this, but he didn't want to spoil Veser's fun. “Good idea,” he said, taking Toni's hand in his left and Napoleon's in his right, and pulling them over so that he was standing opposite of Veser. The reaper's-assistant looked surprised that Hanna had agreed to the idea so readily. Still, he grabbed the two empty hands hastily and they all sat in a circle around the empty spot above which Lee's body had once hung.  
  
Hanna wondered if Veser was so caught up in holding Toni's hand that he didn't even have a thought to spare about the fact that his other hand held that of a zombie. He'd been pretty freaked out by the undead man the day before, but history showed that pretty girls had quite the power to make men forget their worries, and from the light glaze over Veser's eyes, history wasn't wrong.  
  
Raimundo wasn't exactly a pretty girl (now _there_ was an image), but Hanna sort of thought he still understood the feeling. They were holding hands now too, weren't they, the two of them? Goodness. His hands were, well, they were much the same as they'd ever been, just papery now, like the rest of his skin. But they were still soft, and still nice to hold in the way that hands _always_ were, if you liked the person they were attached to. (True, Hanna had held his hand just a few days ago, briefly, when they'd shook in the tiny forest clearing, but shaking hands was over so quickly. It wasn't like _holding_ at all.) The zombie was holding on with conviction, like perhaps he believed that Veser's lame suggestion would actually help somehow. Or maybe he just liked holding hands too. Hanna had to stop himself from doing something silly like stroking the back of Raimundo's hand or twining their fingers together, because that was probably a little more intimate than was strictly necessary for 'channeling energy' and all that.  
  
Veser looked around at the rest of them, like the leader of a group of teenagers doing a séance in any old movie over the past few decades. (Really, why were kids always doing seances in creepy abandoned houses? It was like the characters had never watched a horror film in their lives; very unrealistic. Or maybe they were just dumb.) The teen took a deep breath and closed his eyes, facing the zombie. Almost immediately, the difference was obvious from when he'd tried the same thing in the cemetery. His brow was furrowed and the corners of his lips turned down over his gritted teeth, making him look like he was almost in pain. Veser's face filtered through a few expressions, like he was scanning a textbook for just the right bit of information or a dictionary for an elusive definition. He sat like that a few minutes, and the others traded concerned glances, but knew it was best not to break his concentration for as long as possible. After a handful more minutes had passed with only Veser's faint pained noises to break the silence, Toni motioned with her head for the zombie to speak to him, guessing wisely that hearing anyone else might distract the reaper-in-training.  
  
“Veser?” the zombie asked softly. The teen gave no reply, but his eyelids fluttered and he clenched his jaw. “Do you see anything?”  
  
“It's red,” Veser said, his voice rough. “Digging through thick, wet, red fog. Familiar. Not a good familiar. Like Lee... and my dad. Rage. Possessiveness. Envy.” He grunted his displeasure.  
  
Raimundo frowned. He seemed quite worried to hear such unpleasant descriptions of his soul. “Is that all you see?”  
  
Veser shook his head, and he swallowed hard. “No, there's other stuff too. Normal things, nice things. But this is... it was hard to find, hard to get past. I don't like it. It doesn't feel right. It doesn't match.” He shuddered, and his grip tightened on both the zombie's and Toni's hands, digging his short fingernails in.  
  
“Ouch, hey!” Toni tried not to jerk away, but Veser was too deep in his vision and just kept holding on tighter until the girl had to yank her hand out of his grasp. (Hanna was glad he was on the other side from Veser; out of the three of them, he was definitely the most susceptible to regular mortal wounds.)  
  
Veser opened his eyes suddenly and pulled away from the two, as if shaken out of a trance. (The circle was broken, so they took their hands from Hanna's too, Toni hastily, Raimundo softly, his fingertips tickling Hanna's palm. Hanna somewhat mourned the loss, but he too was more concerned about the matter at hand.) Veser looked wildly over at the cringing wolf-girl and down at her palm, which she was massaging.  
  
“Shit, are you okay?”  
  
“I'm fine,” she told him, waving him off. “Werewolves heal really fast.” She showed him her hand, and the skin looked only a little dented, but they could still see the tiny smear of blood. “Are _you_ okay?” she asked.  
  
He nodded, eyes wide and mouth still hanging open. “Yeah.” He turned then to the zombie and kind of stared at him a bit, as if he wasn't sure that he trusted him after seeing what was in his soul. He looked like he wanted to say something, but didn't know just what.  
  
The zombie looked like he wasn't sure that he entirely trusted himself either, but he was adamant when he announced, “I don't think that's me, the rage, the envy. I don't _feel_ like it is.”  
  
Hanna knew it wasn't. He knew the detective, and he knew Raimundo hadn't changed since then, not in the ways that mattered. Rage was not a part of that man. Envy, most certainly not. No, the man was too gentle for those sorts of emotions, almost to a fault. (Hanna would have told him back in the day that he could stand to be a little more ruthless, when dealing with the scum they sometimes had to put up with. These days, he was glad the man had never taken his suggestions.) Those feelings, those harsh emotions... they sounded like sins. And what embodied sins more than demons. Hanna did his best not to look alarmed.  
  
“Did you see anything specific?” Toni asked. She'd stopped massaging her palm and folded her hands together in her lap, though Veser still looked guilty. “You're trying to figure out who brought him back to life, right?”  
  
Veser shook his head. “I can't remember. It was like a dream, like I felt like I could understand everything but then I woke up and none of it made sense anymore.”  
  
“Maybe it'll come back to you,” Hanna suggested, though he rather hoped it didn't. He hadn't wanted to do this in the first place, and now he'd gotten what he needed-- confirmation of his fears. Anything more would be further complication he wasn't interested in.  
  
“Should I try again?” Veser asked, though the uneasy way he glanced at the two who sat adjacent to him made it pretty clear he wasn't very eager.  
  
“Nah,” Hanna said, shrugging like he didn't mean 'hell no'. “It's hard to get dreams back after they're gone anyway. I wouldn't bother.”  
  
It was easy enough to agree upon _that,_ but Toni had another idea. “Maybe he should read your soul too. You know, for comparison.”  
  
It occurred to Hanna then that Toni was probably way too smart for _his_ own good. Normally, if it were a third party they were dealing with, Hanna would have recommended it. As it was: no way. He hadn't thought Veser would be able to read a living soul, so he hadn't been too concerned, but now that it was apparently within the realm of possibility, that kid was not going within ten feet of the idea, if he could help it. Veser looked like he wasn't super keen on the idea but that he'd do pretty much anything that Toni even casually suggested. Hanna shook his head, but not too vehemently. “I don't think that'd be a good idea,” he said, coughing to cover up the slight wobble in his voice. “I mean, I don't think it'd really be a good comparison, because of the magic and all.”  
  
“So where does that leave you?” Toni asked. “Angry red fog... I mean, does that help at all?” The zombie looked curiously at Hanna as well.  
  
Yes, and no, and it was hard to say. There was no answer that they would want to hear. (Well, they'd want to hear “yes”, but then they'd want to hear what he'd figured out, and they weren't going to want to hear 'demons'... or at least, Hanna didn't want to say it.) “It's better than what we had before,” he ended up saying.  
  
Veser scoffed. “That there was 'something'? Yeah, that was a lame assessment on the old man's part. And now we know that that something is evil. Bleh. I feel like I need a shower.”  
  
Hanna almost laughed at the idea that you could wash away evil with a little warm water and soap. You could take a swim in holy water and it probably wouldn't help. The evil was inside, so deep you'd have to tear yourself open to your core to get it out. His chest ached at the thought.  
  
The zombie blinked slowly at Veser. “I'm sorry for the discomfort I caused you.”  
  
“Pfft. It's not your fault. That angry part's not you, right? Man, if it's anyone's fault it's the old man's for making me help you when he probably could've told you the same thing in ten seconds.”  
  
“Even so, thank you.”  
  
Veser waved it off. “Yeah, it's my job,” he said, though he wasn't fooling anyone that he didn't appreciate the gratitude.  
  
Now that they'd all agreed that they were done with today's semi-successful attempt at soul reading, there was really no reason for the four of them to stay. Toni was first to say goodbye.  
  
“Well, this has been fun,” she said with a short partly-sarcastic laugh, “but I've really gotta get home. I told Brandon I'd be back like an hour ago.”  
  
“Brandon?” Veser's eyes widened and a suspiciously worried look came over his face. “Is that your boyfriend?”  
  
“My brother,” Toni replied, amused but unsurprised by his reaction.  
  
“How's he doing?” Hanna asked as he stood and dusted himself off. (Whereas dusting oneself off was usually just sort of a habit, in this case, it really was necessary.)  
  
Toni nodded. “He's a lot better now. Thanks. I told him about you. Maybe when you're done with this, um, case, maybe we can get together for lunch or something.”  
  
“Sounds good,” Hanna said, and it really did sound good. Kinda sounded good like Heaven sounds good when your soul is sauntering vaguely downward, but he didn't tell her that.  
  
“Okay.” Toni smiled and headed towards the hallway. “Nice to meet you under better circumstances, Veser. And nice to see you again, Mr. Cross and... um. Gosh, sorry, I actually don't think I ever caught your name?” She tilted her head at the zombie.  
  
“Napoleon,” the zombie said, before looking at Hanna questioningly. “At least, that's what it was this morning.”  
  
Hanna laughed. “I've been going with Raimundo for the last half hour, but I'll have to change it now that everybody knows.”  
  
Toni looked like she knew she had no idea what was going on, so she just smiled the smile of not being in on a joke but still recognizing it. “Well, it was nice to see you again anyway, Mr. Cross's mysterious partner.” She waved goodbye and let herself out into the hall.  
  
“Alright. So.” Hanna looked around at his remaining... whatever you might wanna call them. Friends? Raimundo seemed contemplative, staring off into the middle distance, and Veser had turned away from them. Neither of them appeared very satisfied with the outcome of the evening, not that he expected them to be. And neither of them seemed very interested in responding to his noncommittal conversation starter. “So, uh, thanks for your help, Veser. I know it was kind of a pain in the ass.”  
  
“It's no big deal,” he said. He sounded distracted, still facing the other direction and staring up at the dusty rafters.  
  
It hadn't exactly seemed like 'not a big deal' when he'd been fussing about it the night before and when he was digging his nails into other people, but Hanna wasn't going to argue. “I don't really have a ton of cash, but do you wanna go get dinner or something?” he asked. “I bet Ples doesn't actually pay you.” He felt sort of like he owed the kid. Even though he wasn't super happy with the end result, Veser _had_ technically done a surprisingly good job.  
  
“Nah,” Veser said, his voice a little distant, a little melancholy. “I'm gonna hang out here for a while. Good luck figuring out what all that junk means.” He waved over his shoulder in their general direction. Some little part of Hanna kind of wanted to protest (what kind of teenager turned down free food?), but he sort of got it. Even though everything was okay now, Veser still needed time to process everything and get past his grief.  
  
“Okay. I guess we'll head out then,” Hanna said. “I'll put in a good word to your boss.” He didn't know if Veser even heard him or if he was too deep in his own thoughts already, but he said 'see ya' anyway and led them out the way Toni had gone. The spotlights that lit the stage had all been shut off; only the lights high up in the ceiling of the auditorium still illuminated the theater. They exited through the side door they'd come in from, back out into the amber glow of the late-night streets. Hanna checked that Raimundo was still with him (and he was, there behind his shoulder, as ever), then began the trek back home.  
  
It wasn't an especially long trip, the theater being just farther from their apartment than Worth's place, so maybe fifteen or twenty minutes at most (as they weren't hurrying), but the fact that Hanna kept waiting for the zombie to say something made it seem longer. There were words on the tip of Raimundo's tongue, Hanna could tell. Once they were inside the apartment building and at no risk of being rained on, he turned and asked.  
  
“Aside from the obvious part about being dead, what's eating you? Sorry, that was bad phrasing. What's bothering you? I thought you'd be happy to be a step closer to figuring things out.”  
  
Raimundo didn't care about Hanna's inadvertent zombie joke, but he did look a bit guilty about not being cheerier. “As much as Veser disliked what he saw tonight, I'd wager it bothers me more.”  
  
“Yeah, I figured,” Hanna said, taking a stairstep backwards. “Doesn't exactly sound like the most pleasant stuff to have floating around in you somewhere.”  
  
“That isn't me,” the zombie said, his bright eyes intense and intent on making Hanna understand. But Hanna understood even more than the man himself did. There was no convincing needed.  
  
“I know,” Hanna reassured him. “I know that's not you.”  
  
“Then why is it in me?”  
  
Raimundo had come to him days ago with the need to know why he was still walking on God's not-so-green earth, with the plea not to let him become a puppet, but even then he hadn't sounded this desperate. It was terrible, and it made Hanna want to spill all sorts of stupid secrets. If he'd had an answer, he'd have given it to the zombie right then and there, right in the middle of the stairwell, to hell with saving face or second chances. But he didn't have an answer, and that was all he could say. “I don't know.”  
  
The zombie nodded, like he was accepting the non-answer, though he was clearly unwilling to let the matter fade. “But you know something. Something bothers you as well.”  
  
Well, the moment of suddenly wanting to spill his secrets had passed, and so Hanna was hyper aware that they were, in fact, standing in the middle of a stairwell where probably twelve other residents with thin walls could hear them. Secret or not, there wasn't a whole lot more on the subject he could say out here, so he led the way up to the third floor and let them into the familiar apartment before even considering how to answer. At least, he was going to consider it, but Raimundo didn't give him much time to come up with plausible excuses.  
  
“What do you know?” he asked again, much less patient than usual, but still downright gentle compared to the sort of interrogations one usually got from police.  
  
Again, the key laid in selectivity. 'What do you know?' was a very open-ended question, one that was practically impossible to answer entirely truthfully. Hanna knew quite a lot of things! Of course, the zombie was not asking about his encyclopedic knowledge, and that was clear enough that Hanna really couldn't pretend he hadn't understood the question. And anyway, he wanted to be …...honest. (Even in his own mind, he had a little war with himself every time that concept came up.)  
  
Now just wasn't the time to come clean about his involvement (it _could_ be, if he wasn't a guilty, spineless coward), but there was something he both _could_ and really _should_ share with his friend if he wanted to keep them both safe, even though he always felt a bit sick thinking about it, let alone discussing it.  
  
“It's not...” Hanna said, then stopped because he wasn't really sure where he was going. “I don't know for sure that this has anything to do with it, but...”  
  
The zombie stared at him, waiting, just inside the closed front door. Hanna fidgeted. He was kind of tired of talking like this here in this sad little apartment, but there was really nowhere else to go, and no way else to talk, with all this crap between them. Until things were sorted out, these heavy, uncomfortable conversations were just gonna keep popping up, weren't they?  
  
What had he been saying? Suddenly all he wanted to do was get everything off his chest.  
  
“I...”  
  
_'I knew you.'  
  
_ The zombie waited. Perhaps he would have held his breath if he had any, or perhaps Hanna was just projecting.  
  
_'I loved you. God, you were the only person that mattered. What did I even do for a hundred years?'_ What had he done? Mostly regretted and shivered in dark corners (metaphorically, for the most part) at the thought of what had taken the man from him. _  
  
_ “I... 'm not afraid of a lot of things, but there are... _evils_ that really scare the shit out of me. I mean, things that are worse than your imagination. They're fucking terrifying. They... destroyed... _everything_ that was important to me, and I know that sounds like an exaggeration, but... it's not.”  
  
Hanna tried not to frown, not to look as horrified as the memory of these things made him feel, but he wasn't sure if it was working. The zombie was looking at him with obvious concern written on his face, so probably not. Raimundo didn't seem to have anything to say, so Hanna just... kept talking.  
  
“You said you remembered Jesus. I dunno if you remember, y'know, the rest of it, and I don't even know if they really have anything to do with that at all, but I've always thought of them as demons. I mean, what else could they be?” He didn't mean for the look he gave the man then to be as pleading as it probably was but he'd never had anyone to talk to about this, at least not since the last time, the time that really cut deep. He just wanted... some sort of validation or someone to say that they understood his fear. He wasn't hoping for anyone to tell him that everything was going to be okay, because that was a little too much to be reasonable.  
  
As rightly he should, the zombie seemed concerned. “You think that's what Veser saw this evening?” The idea didn't appear to sicken him quite the way it did Hanna, but the zombie lacked the first-hand experience that made it so horrible to the necromancer.  
  
He didn't 'think so' in the way that one 'thought so' about a hypothesis, so he said, “Not necessarily. I'm just worried.”  
  
For a few moments, Raimundo seemed deep in thought. “Thank you,” he said, not quite looking at Hanna, as if his vision were still focused inward on his heavy thoughts. “For sharing this with me. I can't say it's what I wanted to hear, but it's good to be informed of the possibilities.”  
  
Hanna nodded, the gesture rather muted compared to his usual. “I thought so too. Uh, sorry I haven't got your case figured out yet. I sorta felt like things were coming together for a while, but tonight kind of threw everything off balance again.”  
  
“It's okay,” the zombie said, and it wasn't quite the same, but it was still almost more than Hanna had hoped for. “We'll work through it together.”  
  
The smile that crept up on Hanna's face was a little sad, but a little sweet, and he didn't bother hiding it. “Yeah, we'll figure it out,” he agreed, not because he totally believed it, but because it sounded good and made his heart swell a bit with fragile helium hope.  
  
Hanna wasn't in much of a mood to talk after that, so he sat for a bit and absorbed the near-silence as Raimundo took to the internet again.  
  
“I think I'm gonna head to bed,” Hanna said after a while, standing and stretching.  
  
Raimundo diverted his attention from the computer screen, focusing his intense eyes on Hanna and blinking owlishly. “Sleep well, and don't fret. We will find more answers tomorrow.”  
  
In Hanna's opinion, that didn't seem entirely likely, but coming from that calm reassuring voice, he couldn't help but believe it a little. He nodded and went to his cocoon of blankets with that hope still doing its feeble best to raise his heart.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the ridiculously long backstory chapter.

  
"It's horrible, to think a man could do that to his own wife."  
  
"And then to kill himself as well? What must have possessed him?"  
  
Though they had their voices low, it was clear the two women had only a care for the _appearance_ of discretion rather than the act itself. If they were as concerned as one would imagine they ought to be, the ladies would have waited until they were out of earshot of the young man, who was still silently reeling in the aftermath.  
  
"The poor boy," one of the women said, glancing over her shoulder quickly, playing at subtlety. "I worry for his sanity, bearing witness to something like that."  
  
"May God have mercy," the other said, bowing her head as they continued down the hall.  
  
The boy sat there on the bench, listening as the gossipers streamed past, but not hearing. His mind was caught in a hazy vision of the horror. He looked at his hands. They'd been washed, roughly, in a panicked frenzy, by the neighbor's wife last night. She'd held him close and muttered calming things in the safety of her hearth-lit kitchen as her husband ran for help. There was no blood on his hands anymore, and the neighbors hadn't the nerves to keep him for more than the night. He was at the church now, waiting.  
  
"Hannibal?"  
  
The priest had been away, tending to some flock or another besides his own. The wolf had never come to his town before. He mustn't have expected it would come that night.  
  
"...Hannibal?"  
  
His eyes were tired from the crying, and dry from forgetting to blink as he stared off into the nothingness. He kept having to remind himself to breathe, yet he felt he was suffocating.  
  
"Father, I understand his parents called him Hanna."  
  
Hanna looked up. Two men stood before him, an older middle-aged man with a kind smile, and a slightly younger man who stood politely behind him. The older man leaned down to look the boy in his down-turned face.  
  
"Hanna, I'm Father Morris. How are you feeling, son?”  
  
The man sounded trustworthy. Hanna had seen him before, but they'd never spoken. Father Morris was a busy man with many responsibilities, many people who looked up to him, and Hanna was only a child, playing in wheat fields and poking through his father's study.  
  
“He hasn't said a word since they brought him here,” the younger man told the priest.  
  
Father Morris breathed deeply, looking at Hanna as if he were searching his soul. Without turning, he asked of the other man, “Can you leave us a while?”  
  
The man nodded and left the priest to stare into Hanna's near-lifeless eyes.  
  
“I'm sure you miss your parents, don't you, Hanna?”  
  
There hadn't been enough time for the young man to miss his parents, or his home, or what used to be his life, but he wished desperately that he could see his mother and father again the way they were two days ago, not screaming and covered in blood like the image burned into his brain. So he nodded.  
  
“What if you could see them again?” Father Morris asked.  
  
Such an obvious question hardly deserved an answer. Yes, yes he would want to see them again, yes, but he was more than old enough to understand that what was gone was gone. The priest, of course, was going to suggest that they would meet again in the afterlife, Hanna thought. “In Heaven?” he asked, a little dejectedly.  
  
The priest shook his head. “On Earth,” he said, smiling with a brightness in his eyes.  
  
To see his parents again on Earth was not possible, Hanna knew, other than in their coffins. Still, though, Father Morris seemed to have something in mind. His smile was great, threatening to break the confines of his calm expression as if his secrets were too much to keep. It was a look that made Hanna curious, more even than the books his father had never let him read.  
  
“Walk with me,” the Father suggested, when Hanna's mouth fell slightly open but no answer came.  
  
He had been to the church before, several times, and was familiar enough with the grounds to know what was where, but it was not comfortable to him as only his home had been. His mother read the Bible often and went to the tiny local chapel most weeks, but they journeyed to the impressive church only on special occasions. Even so, Hanna recognized the sprawling cemetery as they neared it.  
  
“Men and women fill these graves,” Father Morris said, gesturing on either side of him as they walked the path down the middle of the cemetery. “Good men, and good women. But not all who die are quite ready to go. They leave behind unanswered questions and unspoken last words. Their spirits are not truly at peace until these matters are dealt with.”  
  
Winding through the side paths between headstones, they found themselves in a shady corner of the graveyard, under a drooping willow. The priest stopped here and turned to Hanna. “There are those who can sometimes help these distressed spirits, communicate with them and fulfill their final wishes so that they may rest eternally.”  
  
It seemed to Hanna that Father Morris was saying something he'd always been taught was impossible. Perhaps, though, he thought, it was something that a man like this could do. “You can speak to ghosts?” he asked, his voice a little scratchy.  
  
Morris nodded sagely. “Yes. I do have that ability.”  
  
“...My parents?” Hanna nearly stuttered the words, trembling as he was after hours of deathlike stillness.  
  
“I could speak with them,” Father Morris said, though the smile he gave Hanna then was still full of secrets. “But would you not rather speak with them yourself?”  
  
Before Hanna could even really think about what it was that the priest was offering, Morris cupped his hands together in front of his chest, glanced quickly to either side of him, then opened his hands to Hanna. In his palms sat a little green flame, twinkling in the shade of the willow tree. “How?” Hanna whispered.  
  
“This flame will tell us if you have the ability,” the priest said, presenting it to the boy, who took it in his own hands with a courage and faith that seemed to have come from nowhere.  
  
The fire was warm, but not hot. It tickled his palms like the scrabbling of tiny mouse feet. As it first touched his skin, the color changed almost instantly from that glowing emerald green to a vibrant red that was still not quite natural in color, but was all the more beautiful for its strangeness. Hanna pressed his hands closer together as if to protect it from the light breeze, and drew it nearer to his chest, as one would keep a small creature calm. Though, truth be told, it was the flame that was calming _his_ heart.  
  
“Wonderful,” Father Morris said, impressed nearly to the point of breathlessness. His grin was wide, and Hanna was pleased to have passed the test, though a twinge of unease was wriggling in his heart. He lost track of it when the priest pulled him into a quick embrace and patted his back proudly. “In time, I believe you could be very strong!”  
  
“I could talk to my parents again?”  
  
“Oh yes, yes,” the priest said. “Most certainly. But first, you must learn. Are you willing to be taught all that I know? The magic it takes to speak with your parents once more?”  
  
_Magic._ Even the word sounded like the feeling of a beating heart, like the mysterious warmth of this bright little flame which Hanna still held between his hands. More than willing to be taught, he felt as if it was his only option, his destiny. Could he live without learning what this power was? He nodded, excited and a little scared.  
  
“Very good.” Father Morris set a hand on Hanna's shoulder, and it felt heavy to the boy, but like an anchor. “First, however, we must get you settled in. I believe you will be staying with us for a while. In time, I hope you come to think of us as your new family.”  
  
It was somewhat an ambitious request, but Hanna nodded again and gave the priest a tentative smile. The weight of the day was still wearing on him, but at least he had something to look forward to now. He followed as Father Morris guided him back to the church, and when he was shown his small room, he didn't compare it to the one he'd had back home. He simply closed the door behind him, retreated to the hard, simple bed, and said good night to the world.  
  
XxX  
  
Breakfast the next morning was a trying affair. Hanna had woken well from a dreamless sleep, cleaned and dressed and made his way to the dining hall in a peaceful, if somewhat blank, state of mind. There was much to absorb in this new place, so sudden and different from what he knew that it was easy to almost think of himself as being a different person entirely. But when he sat and tried to focus on his bland, unremarkable porridge, the whispers found their way into his ears and disrupted the new identity he'd spent the morning cultivating.  
  
“Joseph always seemed so nice, but now I can only think of every time we spoke, did he have thoughts to kill me?”  
  
“It's the quiet ones you got to watch out for!”  
  
“Someone best keep an eye on that boy, then. Could be he takes after his father too much, we're not careful.”  
  
“We don't need that kind of danger here. Maybe he ought to be sent to a home in the city. A factory job.”  
  
“Father Morris wants to keep him on. Ahh, he's a holier man than _me_! Boy'd be out on the street, if it was up to me, that kind of darkness in his blood.”  
  
The porridge was horrible enough before, but hearing those comments put Hanna off his appetite entirely. He forced down a few more spoonfuls then sidled out of the dining hall as unassumingly as possible. He wanted to speak to Father Morris, but the man was busy and wouldn't be available until evening, so he returned to the shady corner of the cemetery, under the willow, and sat in silence.  
  
A gentle breeze blew through the drooping boughs overhead, and it was calming. But there was too little to distract him out here, too little to make a new life out of, and his mother's screams began to trickle back into his head. He closed his eyes and clasped his hands together and said a desperate prayer or some instinctive words or whatever his mind supplied him with in hopes of making the memory go away, and after a moment, he felt a warmth between his palms.  
  
Hanna opened his eyes and looked down, pulling his palms apart just a fraction of an inch, and was somehow unsurprised to find the little red flame twinkling there in the safety of his hands. He sighed a breath of relief that something had heard his silent call for help and come to his aid, to distract, to inspire. Looking at the tiny fire, he could imagine a life so different from the one he lived before that the screams and blood that threatened to fill him could find no familiar cracks through which to invade.  
  
Again, he closed his eyes, holding the small flame safe in his hands, and fell into a daydream.  
  
Later that night, after dinner and evening mass, Father Morris summoned Hanna to his office.  
  
“How are you settling in?” he asked, attention only half focused on the boy as he continued writing.  
  
For a moment, Hanna planned to reply, 'well', as he'd been taught was polite. After all, the church was providing for him, and he was supposed to be grateful. But the whispers from this morning (and this afternoon, and this evening) were still on his mind, and weighing down his heart. He took a deep breath, but it turned into a sigh. “The people here hate me,” he told Morris, his whole face a frown.  
  
Father Morris glanced up at him, but then back down to his papers. “Nonsense, Hanna. What reason would they have to hate you?”  
  
“They said I might...” The words to describe what the sisters and brothers and laypeople all thought, to describe what he'd witnessed, couldn't seem to leave his mouth. “...that I might do... something bad, like my father did. Because we have the same blood.”  
  
“Is that what they said?” Father Morris asked, sounding disappointed. He set down his pen and fixed Hanna with a strong look. “I'm sure they mean well, but they don't understand what they say.”  
  
Hanna appreciated the priest's words, but he didn't quite believe it. “So it's not true what they say?”  
  
“Do you think it's true?” Father Morris laced his fingers together in front of him on the desk. “Do you feel you might harm someone?”  
  
Hanna shook his head, his eyes wide. “No, but the sister said nobody expected my dad to either because he always seemed so nice! They said you have to watch out for people when they're quiet.”  
  
The priest chuckled. “On that account, they could learn something from your father! The sisters can be so chatty, it's a wonder they hear God at all. Being quiet is no sin.”  
  
Father Morris' casual joking did put Hanna somewhat more at ease, but he was still concerned about the situation. Not only did he want the church-people to stop looking at him as if he might snap any moment, he wanted badly for someone to understand about what had happened that night, to understand what he saw!  
  
“Father Morris... My father was a good man! Wasn't he?”  
  
“I didn't know him well,” Morris admitted, though he nodded. “But he did seem a good man, from what I knew of him. Perhaps... perhaps he became ill.”  
  
He didn't like to have to correct a priest, but Hanna knew his father had not been ill. “No,” he said, his throat feeling swollen. “Even if he was sick, he wouldn't do that. The neighbors didn't believe me, but I saw his eyes. It was a demon in him.”  
  
The priest's eyes didn't widen in shock, nor did they soften in patronizing disbelief. “Son, you were distraught. Any fright would look a demon.”  
  
Hanna could only shake his head. “No. It was a demon. I know what I saw. Mother saw it too, in his eyes. It wasn't him. He looked straight at me! That wasn't my father.”  
  
Father Morris didn't want to believe it. After all, he had not thought the wolf would ever come for his flock. “Truly, a demon, you say? I suppose it could be true.”  
  
“It is!” Hanna insisted, his shoulders tense and trembling. Maybe he could never get the church-people to believe that his father was not a killer, but he felt as if Father Morris should be able to understand. If the man could speak to the dead, shouldn't it be quite clear to him? “My parents will tell you! Just speak to them. You said you could!”  
  
“It is not that easy,” the priest said, shaking his head. “I have told you, there is much for you to learn before we can do that.”  
  
Hanna was not opposed to learning, but he did oppose waiting. “Then teach me now,” he pleaded. “Look, I can already call the flame!” He put his hands together and summoned the little fire, then showed it to Morris, desperately pleased with himself.  
  
The Father reached forward and scooped the little flame up into his own hand, the color paling to a ghostly green as it touched his skin. “I see,” he said, rolling it like a juggler's orb from his palm to the back of his hand. “Were you practicing this today? In the church?”  
  
“Only in the cemetery,” Hanna said, disappointed that Father Morris didn't seem more pleased.  
  
Morris waved his hand, dismissing the flame. “You must be careful not to use magic where you may be seen. As I've said, the laypeople may mean well, but they do not understand. They may not respond kindly.”  
  
Hanna wanted to protest, ' _You_ do magic,' but he knew there was a great difference between the two of them. So he said, “Alright,” and hoped that the simple acquiescence would endear him to the priest enough that the man might agree to start teaching him straight away.  
  
“That is good,” Father Morris said. “If you understand, then we may begin your teaching.” Before Hanna could get too excited, the priest turned to search for something in the bookshelf behind his desk. “Can you recognize all the local herbs and flowers?” he asked as he looked.  
  
“...No?” Hanna responded, hopeful that his lack of knowledge wouldn't bring his learning to a halt before it began. “I.. I know daffodils and sunflowers and mint... and basil. A-and I can tell poison oak from poison ivy!”  
  
The priest pulled a book off the shelf and leafed through it, then put it back and continued down the line. “That is a start. There are many more, even than what a chef or a doctor may know, and to mix the wrong ones could be fatal. ...Ah, here's the one.” He found a fairly large leather-bound book and handed it to Hanna. “Your first lesson is to memorize twenty plants. When you think you can remember them without the book, go and fetch a sample of each, and bring them to me. If you identify them all correctly, I will teach you a magic spell.”  
  
Apothecary knowledge was hardly what Hanna had been anticipating when Father Morris agreed to teach him to speak with the dead, but the promise of being taught a real spell was so tantalizing, Hanna nodded, hastily thanked the Father, and ran back to his room to begin studying. He stayed up nearly all night pouring over the book, and was so tired in the morning that he scarcely noticed the stares and whispers in the corridors and dining hall. After that, he spent the whole afternoon searching the gardens and the weeds growing along the edges of the cemetery, and slept through lunch when he fell asleep under the willow.  
  
After dinner, he rushed to the priest's office and laid in front of him a collection of plants, which he then eagerly rambled off the names and basic properties of. Father Morris appeared genuinely shocked and professed that he hadn't expected Hanna to return in less than a week, let alone with the correct answers, but taught him a spell, as promised. Hanna stayed up nearly all _this_ night practicing the light rune, scribbling the mysterious foreign symbol in chalk all over the floor of his tiny room, and hastily rubbing them out when he heard footsteps approaching down the hall.  
  
It continued like this. By the time the first month had passed, Hanna no longer noticed if people were talking about him in the halls, and he had amassed a good handful of spells and tricks. Though on that first night he had never imagined it possible, he found that he was feeling almost comfortable again. The learning and the magic did not erase the pain or the horrible memory or his desire to clear the air with his parents, but the nightmares had disappeared, and that was as much as he could hope.  
  
XxX  
  
As Father Morris had said, there was indeed much to learn. There was _very_ much to learn. Hanna didn't mind in the slightest, for every tiny spell or potion or amulet he learned to create was exciting to him, but he did become increasingly anxious to do as the Father had originally promised and learn how to speak with the dead. The church-people had long since stopped slandering his father's name, and that terrible night was far enough from everyone's memory that it was beyond the point of trying to convince anyone of his father's innocence, but he still wished to hear from the mouths of his two parents that there was no ill will anywhere between them.  
  
For the first year of the young man's stay at the church, the priest had focused on teaching him what he called the fundaments of magic, the very basic things that were necessary to know before one continued on into the more detailed, the more arcane of the arts.  
  
“Do you feel quite confident in the abilities you've learned this past year, Hanna?” Father Morris asked one evening as they quietly studied in his office.  
  
“ _Very_ confident, Father,” Hanna replied, demonstrating his prowess by levitating the pen he was using, a useless but entertaining little spell he'd picked up recently from one of the priest's secret books he'd been finally allowed to read.  
  
“Levitation is not a prerequisite for the higher magics,” Morris chided, though he smiled at Hanna's show. The man was proud of each new thing the boy learned, and his encouragement made Hanna work even harder.  
  
“Yes, Father,” Hanna said, setting the pen down and looking away to hide his grin.  
  
Morris finished the segment of notes he was working on and then set them aside. He stood and came around to the other side of the desk, where Hanna was sitting. “I believe you are ready to take the next step in your learning, Hanna. Tonight I have a very important task to do, and I'd like you to help me with it.”  
  
“What is it?” Hanna asked.  
  
That was perhaps a bit too blunt of a way of speaking to someone with such authority and Hanna was aware of that, but the priest was always forgiving of the boy's lapses in formality, especially given how familiar they had become. “One of the townspeople passed away some weeks ago. I must speak with him.”  
  
“You want my help in speaking with a dead person?” Hanna's eyes went wide with hope that tonight would finally be the night he was to learn what he'd been working toward all year.  
  
In truth, though he would indeed learn the spell he desired that night, the process was somewhat less glamorous than he had imagined. Before they departed, they stopped by the stables, which were dark and quiet but for the gentle snoring of horses.  
  
“We'll need this,” the priest said, handing Hanna a shovel that was shorter than him, but only just.  
  
“...Digging?” Hanna asked, trying to figure out how best to carry the thing.  
  
Father Morris laughed. “I must speak with the man, Hanna. How am I to hear his reply if he is covered in six feet of dirt?”  
  
That simply hadn't occurred to Hanna. It made some sense that they would have to go to the cemetery to do the ritual, but he had thought... well, he hadn't thought that speaking with the dead would require exhuming the corpses, for some reason. It did seem obvious to him though, now that it was mentioned.  
  
When they arrived at the cemetery and made quite sure there was no one else around, Hanna was set to the task of shoveling away the earth from the grave, upon which tiny blades of grass and wildflowers had just begun to sprout. The priest used that time to measure out the ingredients they needed and set them around the deepening grave in configurations Hanna did his best to take notice of. Father Morris _did_ explain what he was doing as he went about it, measuring, mixing, arranging, but it was difficult for Hanna to pay as much attention to it as he would have liked, busy as he was with the digging and trying to ignore the stinging of the sweat falling in his eyes.  
  
By the time the coffin was revealed and the cover removed, Hanna hardly even had the energy to be disgusted by the pungent smell of flesh that had been rotting for several weeks. Morris was not distracted by exhaustion, but still the scent did not seem to bother him. He came to stand quite close to the corpse, kneeling there and motioning for Hanna to join him. The boy was not terribly enthused, but he did as he was asked and went to stand behind the priest.  
  
“After the circle has been laid, you simply have to say the incantation,” Morris told him. “If you have something that belonged to the person which you can hold on to, they will respond to you better.” He pulled a knife from his pocket and showed it to Hanna before curling it in his left hand. His right hand he held out over the corpse as if he were going to tap the man on the chest, and then he said the words. Hanna recognized them as being Latin-based, familiar enough to place but odd enough that he doubted he could recall them again without hearing them repeated several more times.  
  
Although he knew that reviving the dead man was the entire purpose of their outing this evening, Hanna was shocked when the corpse opened his eyes, clearly and suddenly as if startled from sleep.  
  
“Morris!” the man exclaimed, perhaps just less surprised than Hanna was. His eyes slid over to the boy, a little slow. “And what's this? You got an apprentice now? Eugene Winslow, nice to meet you.” Mr. Winslow tried to reach out to present his hand to Hanna for shaking, but seemed to realize after a moment of struggling that he simply didn't have the energy. He gave the boy a friendly nod instead.  
  
“Uh, Hanna Cross,” he replied. “Hello.”  
  
“Cross?” Mr. Winslow repeated. “You Joseph and Mercy's son?”  
  
Hanna grinned to have anyone remember his parents in such a positive tone of voice, but before he could respond, Father Morris cut in. “Please don't pester him about his parents, Eugene. They passed a year ago. Hanna, I would like to speak with Mr. Winslow in private, if you don't mind. Our stock of cat o' nine tails is nearly empty. Could you go collect some by the creek? Fifty stalks should do.”  
  
Despite the smell, Hanna felt he'd rather like to stay and speak with Mr. Winslow a bit longer, but Father Morris was giving him a look which made it fairly clear that the request for cat o' nine tails was really an order in polite disguise. He said, “Yes, Father,” gave Mr. Winslow a parting nod, and trudged over to the creek at the far side of the graveyard. The men began to speak as soon as he was several yards gone, but the only sentence he was still close enough to make out was Mr. Winslow's, “Clever move, taking in the boy.” Hanna felt a bit proud of himself that his skill was evident enough for a stranger to compliment his tutor on him.  
  
The past season hadn't been especially rainy, so the creek was somewhat dry. Hanna had to wander down the bank quite a ways before he was able to find fifty tails, and when he returned Father Morris was already finished speaking to Mr. Winslow. The priest had taken apart the spell circle and put all the remaining ingredients back in his satchel.  
  
“Is he gone?” Hanna asked, dismayed when he peered down at the man and found him as lifeless as when they'd dug him up.  
  
Morris nodded. “I finished my business with him, so I sent him back. It doesn't do to keep the deceased any longer than you must.”  
  
“Oh. Darn. I was hoping to talk with him.” Hanna glanced at the man wistfully.  
  
“You don't want to keep him from Heaven _too_ long, do you?” Father Morris asked, using the same voice he used when asking an obvious moral question during a sermon.  
  
“I guess not,” Hanna replied, though he didn't see that it would make a big difference to pull him back for just another few minutes. Heaven couldn't be _that_ good.  
  
The ritual over, the two of them set the heavy lid back on the coffin and shoveled the dirt back into the hole. They packed it down as firmly as they could, trying to leave the area looking as undisturbed as possible, although Hanna knew the priest could come up with a plausible excuse if someone wondered why Mr. Winslow's grave appeared to have been tampered with.  
  
When they arrived back in Father Morris' office (after returning the shovel off at the stables, no worse for the wear, and dropping off the cat o' nine tails in the store room), the man turned to Hanna and smiled benevolently. “What did you think of your first resurrection?”  
  
“I didn't do much,” Hanna said, trying not to let it seem like he was grumbling. “I'm very tired though.”  
  
Morris laughed. “Your help this evening was invaluable, and it's an important part of the process. Was it so tiring as to dissuade you from pursuing necromancy?” he asked, though from his smile it was quite clear he knew the answer.  
  
“No, I still want to learn! I mean... please continue to teach me?”  
  
“Have no worries, Hanna,” the priest said, chuckling. He took his seat at his desk and pulled up some of his paperwork. “We will continue. But, tomorrow, I think. You should get some rest before the morning comes.”  
  
Hanna nodded and made to leave, bidding the Father “sleep well” as he closed the door behind him. He wasn't sure the Father _would_ sleep, dedicated to his notes as he always was, but Hanna still remembered some of the manners his parents had taught him.  
  
xXx  
  
Hanna's learning _did_ continue, as the priest had promised. It was only a day or two later that he was formally taught the spell for returning a spirit to a corpse. However, Father Morris claimed it was too dangerous to write down, lest one of the church-people come across it, so they spent several weeks reviving small animals in jars in his office, until Hanna felt he had it memorized.  
  
After that, Hanna finally got the chance to try it out on humans. Father Morris stood back and supervised as the boy set up the spell, meticulously drawing the lines and circles and carefully measuring out the piles of ingredients. He knelt besides the young woman's body and reached out as if to touch her, then repeated the words he'd heard so often over the past weeks. Everything seemed to be going well as the woman opened her eyes, but she took only a moment to look around before she started screaming.  
  
She fell back, dead, after only a tense second; Father Morris had rushed forward and disrupted the circle drawn around her coffin before her shrieks could go on long enough to be recognizable as human by any people who might be within hearing distance. His eyes were wide, but not wider than Hanna's, who looked and felt liked he'd just seen a ghost.  
  
“It's nothing you did wrong,” Morris assured Hanna when they were safely back in the office. “I simply hadn't anticipated such a reaction. Before we try again, perhaps you should learn some additional charms for securing a corpse's compliance.”  
  
And so Hanna studied the spells for increased cooperation, for imbuing a revived person with greater or lesser mobility, for disguising their physical state, and a variety of other things, and the next time he attempted to bring a person back to the world of the living, it went quite smoothly. From then on, Father Morris took him along most evenings that there was some necromantic work to be done, and Hanna didn't even begrudge the older man for making him do all the digging.  
  
As the church-people certainly took note of, Hanna even began to accompany Father Morris on his short journeys to other towns where, unbeknownst to the laymen, the priest and his assistant handled magical problems that nobody else in the area could do, though often under the guise of blessings. The praise that the two of them were consistently showered with raised Hanna's confidence beyond even the thrill of his successes. Only the fact that he was lying to everyone else soured his mood at all.  
  
“Does it not bother you?” Hanna asked the priest one evening.  
  
Father Morris tilted his head at the young man. “Many things bother me, Hanna. Of which do you speak?”  
  
“Our magic,” Hanna said. “That we can't tell others the truth about what we do. Doesn't it bother you to lie to them?”  
  
Solemnly, the priest shook his head. “I believe honesty is a virtue to be commended, but this is a secret we keep to _protect_ people. There is no need for the laymen to know the details of what we do. That knowledge would only bring them distress.”  
  
“Because magic is condemned by the Bible?”  
  
“Because they do not understand that the words I read to them on Sundays are only half of the story.”  
  
Hanna took that explanation and thought it over for a few days, as they continued their work and study. Then he came to the conclusion that there was an easy solution. “Why don't you tell the people about magic? Then you could be honest with them. Maybe you could even teach them as you've taught me!”  
  
Morris opened his mouth, but he didn't seem to have an answer to Hanna's suggestion. He seemed to be chewing on words as they crawled up his throat, and they were somewhat less distinct than usual by the time they reached the air. “That... would not work, Hanna. The people... I have tried before. The people do not _want_ to know. You must be careful what you tell them.”  
  
Still, Hanna was not convinced. It was obvious to him that if they did not have to hide from the others, their job would be much easier. And _he_ was happier knowing about magic, so why shouldn't everyone else be? He thought about broaching the subject with them.  
  
Perhaps it was coincidence, or perhaps they were heartened by his new confidence, or maybe the priest had simply told them to act more like Christians, but the church-people had finally warmed up to Hanna. It wasn't a sudden thing, but where there had once been suspicious stares or pitying whispers, there were now courteous nods and casual smiles. They began to include him in plans and conversations, catching him in the halls to spread gossip and sitting with him at meals.  
  
“I'm glad you have recovered from the unfortunate incident,” one sister said cheerily as she waited near Hanna for breakfast. He responded politely as he was taught, and they chatted until they reached the front of the line.  
  
“Father Morris has really taken to you, hasn't he?” a church-goer asked rhetorically as they waited for the sermon one Sunday morning. “You must be something special.” Hanna said his thanks with as much modesty as he could muster.  
  
“I'll admit, I'm a bit jealous,” a young initiate told Hanna as they walked the same way down the hall on a breezy afternoon. “Not that you don't deserve the Father's attention,” he amended, chuckling nervously. Hanna laughed it off with him as they continued down the hall together.  
  
He wanted to _tell them_ , all these decent people who were opening up to him, but he was never quite close enough to any of them to judge how receptive they might be, and there was never a time that seemed quite right to risk bringing it up.  
  
“Did you hear about that Sister Celene?” a man mentioned as Hanna harvested herbs near where he was working in the garden. “Heard she was caught talkin' to the Devil himself the other night. Dunno what's gonna happen to 'er, but she deserves whatever it is.”  
  
“They caught some witches last week, a few towns away,” a brother whispered to him as they ate dinner. “A whole family of them, I hear. Guess evil really does run in the blood. Ah, I mean...” He smiled in embarrassed apology. “Not for really good folks, I'm sure.”  
  
Hanna wasn't sure why the people had such a negative, visceral reaction to even the mention of magic. If ever he asked for details of these cases, the gossiper never had much to give, just the assertion that their assumptions had to be right, because what else could it have been? Sister Celene had some 'sinister circle' drawn on the floor of her room, and she was talking to someone, yet there was nobody in the room. It had to have been the devil, the gardener said, just repeating what he'd been told. The family of witches, well, nobody had actually seen them doing any magic, but rumors were enough to justify a raid on their house, and a small collection of herbs and amulets was enough to convince the local judge. There was so little evidence, but a great fear and a great desire to punish for supposed 'misdeeds'.  
  
The stories put Hanna on edge, as he compared them to his own. More than a few times, he had nearly been caught with chalk runes scrawled all over his floor, and such a variety of charms and ingredients were owned between he and Father Morris, that he almost wondered how he had _not_ been accused of witchcraft yet. He thanked his lucky stars that he had taken heed of the priest's warning not to summon the little flame anywhere that people might see, despite how it warmed him when their commentary was too cold.  
  
He mentioned Celene and the witch family to Morris after he'd dwelt on their sad fates for a while.  
  
“They were careless,” the Father said, though he nodded his head in deference to the poor souls, who'd all been dealt with quite harshly. “They should have known better.”  
  
“Why didn't they?”  
  
Father Morris shook his head briefly. “Perhaps they lacked a good mentor.”  
  
Hanna smiled, glad-- no, _beyond_ glad that he had Father Morris to guide him. _If only_ , he thought, if only magic were not so taboo, the Father could have taught these people openly. But he realized now, there just wasn't a way to make people change their minds about it, when he could not even approach the subject without making people paranoid. Had that been Celene's downfall? And the witch family? Had they even been magic-users at all and not maybe just curious people who said the wrong thing to the wrong folks? He asked the priest.  
  
“I cannot say for sure,” Morris replied. “I never met the Fosters, and I don't know what sort of damning artifacts were taken from their home. As for Celene, ah, the ritual she was caught doing certainly was some sort of magic, though she claimed continuously that it had nothing to do with the devil.”  
  
“So she _was_ a magic user?” Hanna asked, surprised and regretful that he had missed the chance to potentially talk with someone else about his studies. “Why didn't you speak up for her?”  
  
The frown on the Father's face deepened. “Not all who use magic can be trusted, Hanna. Not all who share our talents are like us. Though I hate to see her life and potential wasted, there are some paths one simply cannot come back from.”  
  
That didn't sound very encouraging to Hanna, or very in line with the messages he heard at church. Weren't sinners supposed to repent? Wasn't there supposed to be hope for everyone? Perhaps there were some sins that just stained you forever. The Father had said that his sermons were only one part of the story, after all.  
  
“Hanna.” The young man looked up, returned from his reverie. Father Morris had a stern but concerned look deepening the wrinkles on his face. “People will try to sway you from your path. Some may mean well when they recite their ignorance at you, but remember all that you have learned. Others still may only seem to mean well. Know that the Devil speaks in a honeyed tongue.”  
  
“Yes, sir,” Hanna responded, aware that Morris was being unusually serious and that any reply less polite than that would trigger further lecturing.  
  
“I'm glad you understand, Hanna,” the priest said, sighing tiredly. “The world can be very dangerous for people like us, if we are not careful.”  
  
Hanna nodded. He comprehended the danger well enough, he thought. Still, he couldn't help but think of Sister Celene. He wished someone had taught her of the dangers as well, and then maybe she would have chosen the right path instead of looking to the Devil for advice, if that was indeed what she was doing. Father Morris had already said she denied the claim, but he was a strong magic user as well as a holy man. Couldn't he tell?  
  
“Father, do you think it was really the Devil she was talking to?”  
  
Morris puzzled over Hanna's question for a moment before he realized it was the Sister he was speaking of. “The Devil himself? I doubt it. Even-- No, at most I believe the Sister may have been consorting with a lesser demon. I doubt she had the power for anything higher. Still, it is good she was found out before it could cause any harm.”  
  
Indeed, Hanna agreed. Even just the word, just the insinuation of demons called to mind images he would rather burn from his memory. It was so _wrong_ that a human could call upon those creatures and set them to ruin someone's life, simply because they were misguided by the Devil's sweet words. How? How could they? His sympathy for Sister Celene faded as he imagined her setting loose a horribly grinning demon upon his poor father, the thing sliding into his skin and digging its claws into his brain, whispering _'kill her'_ as it laughed. For a moment, Hanna forgot to breathe.  
  
“Are you thinking of your parents?” the priest asked, ever aware of the way Hanna's mind worked.  
  
“Mm-hmm,” the young man hummed quietly, eyes focused in the shadows as he tried to pull himself back out of the terrible void of his imagination.  
  
“Everything will be alright,” Morris said softly. “The day draws ever nearer that you will see them again. Until then, your magic must continue to grow.”  
  
Hanna listened to Father Morris' steady voice, his calm words, and drew himself back to the present. “Yes sir,” he whispered, finally looking at the man. “...Thank you.” He had to believe that the man's words were true, and it wasn't hard, it never had been. Yes, Hanna would speak with his parents again, and he went to bed holding on to that thought. As he was falling into dreams, though, a niggling little reminder came to him that even if he could see them again, they were still really and truly dead, and nothing could reverse their ruthless slaughter.  
  
xXxXx  
  
As days, months, and seasons passed, Hanna could feel the moment coming closer, as if his parents were straining to reach him from the other side, and he reached for them as well. He studied whatever he could get access to, and practiced relentlessly, even when Father Morris deemed his progress adequate. The priest had said his magic needed to be stronger, and he took it to heart.  
  
As soon as Morris mentioned teaching him to call back the spirits of the dead when their bodies were too far gone, Hanna was ready. He wanted to know.  
  
“This is a harder spell, Hanna,” the Father warned him. “It takes a great deal of concentration and quite a lot of magical energy. I'm not sure you have it in you just yet.”  
  
Father Morris' doubt annoyed Hanna, especially as it was he who suggested the topic in the first place. “I can do it!” he told the man, confident and impatient. “Whatever it takes, I can handle it.”  
  
The priest made a face that Hanna had come to realize meant he was skeptical but pleased. “If that is what you truly believe, then fine. Tomorrow night, come to the basement.”  
  
“Not the graveyard?” Hanna asked, although Morris could have suggested they meet on the moon and the young man would have accepted it, so badly he wanted to take the next step.  
  
“No, there is nothing we need in the cemetery this time.”  
  
The basement was a dark, quiet place that smelled of earth even more than the garden did. Rarely did the church-people come down here, except to borrow something from one of the store rooms, and there would be no reason for any of them to visit at midnight, even less so than the cemetery.  
  
For once, Father Morris brought with him one of his leather-bound books, though this one was a small personal journal, full of diagrams and spells written in his own hand. He bid Hanna to measure out the ingredients as if this were to be any normal raising, and then set to drawing a large chalk circle on the cool stone floor, referencing his book often.  
  
“I have little use for this spell in my day to day activities,” he explained, “so the details slip from my conscious mind if it has been too long.”  
  
The setup took much longer than usual, and Hanna was slightly dismayed at the realization that he would have to practice this quite a lot before he was fluent enough in the language of this particular spell to utilize it for what he most desired. Still, he was determined, and knowing that it would be a challenge steeled his resolve.  
  
When the circle and all of its writings and runes were in place, Father Morris stepped back. “There it is,” he told Hanna, gesturing with his nose. He handed his journal to the young man, already open to the right page. “I leave it to you, Hanna. Let us see what you can do.”  
  
Hanna took the journal and read over the page. Not only was the incantation written in its requisite Latin-esque, but the rest of the instructions were in Latin as well. He wasn't well-versed in the language by far, but by now he knew a spell when he saw one. He read the incantation several times over in his head, then took a deep breath and stood directly before the circle. As he opened his mouth to say the words aloud, the priest interrupted him.  
  
“One more thing,” he said. “If you want this spell to work without fail, there is one more component you should add.”  
  
“What is it?” Hanna asked, irritated at being interrupted, but more willing than ever to take suggestions from his mentor. He _did_ want this to work. He _needed_ it to work. What final ingredient had the priest failed to mention beforehand?  
  
“A small sacrifice,” Morris said. “A few drops of your blood will prove to the spirits that you are worthy.” He didn't give Hanna much time to consider the idea before he stepped forward and handed him a short knife.  
  
Hanna looked at the knife. Then he looked at his arms, his hands. He had never caused himself harm on purpose before... but the Father had made the suggestion, and his face was serious. It wasn't a joke. Just a few drops wouldn't hurt, not in the grand scheme of things, and not compared to what he'd already suffered. He removed the knife from its cover, dropping the sheath to the ground, and carefully took the point to the tip of his index finger.  
  
“Good,” Morris said softly. “Careful not to take too much. You needn't sacrifice your whole life. There, let it drop just inside the circle, then continue with the incantation quickly.”  
  
Kneeling beside the chalk lines, Hanna squeezed several drops and watched them splatter on the dusty floor between the two layers of the circle. He stood and dropped the knife, kicking it out of the way as he glanced down at the open journal and located the phrase he needed. “ _Nos redire, o Sarah Miller spiritus de excelso caelorum ubi cubes._ _”_  
  
And like a small cloud had decided to form in the dense, musty air of the cellar, the spirit came to them. It was clearly human, though the lines of the woman's body seemed lost in the colorless mist. She stood upright, though her form floated and wavered, like her memory recognized gravity even though her incorporeal being defied it.  
  
“Hello, Miss Miller,” Father Morris said from several paces behind Hanna. “It is a pleasure to see you again after so long.”  
  
“How long?” she asked, her voice echoing almost endlessly despite the small size of the stone room. She didn't wait for an answer, distracted from her inquiry by her surroundings. “You've brought me back to this dreary world.”  
  
“Not for long, I promise,” the priest told her. “My apprentice simply needed the practice.”  
  
“Yes,” Miss Miller drawled, looking at Hanna with no obvious expression on her wispy face. “Laeticia. How fares Laeticia?” she asked, her gaze slowly drifting back to the priest.  
  
“Well enough,” Morris said, and they talked slowly for another several minutes as Hanna digested the strange situation. It was not terribly unlike what he had been expecting, yet it was still so fantastical. Miss Miller's ethereal body was a wonder to behold, so unlike the talking corpses Hanna had dealt with so often over the past year that it felt almost like a dream.  
  
They sent her away again before too long, after Hanna thoroughly thanked her for her cooperation. They didn't rush to clean up the area, Hanna taking his time to disassemble the circle, studying it carefully since it wasn't likely anyone would stumble upon them even if they lingered past dawn.  
  
“How are you feeling?” the priest asked as they made their way back upstairs to replace the tools in his office.  
  
“Huh? Oh, I'm fine, thank you,” Hanna said when he realized Father Morris meant his pricked finger. Truly, he'd forgotten about it, so entranced by the specter. It did sting a little now that he was thinking of it again, but he didn't want to worry the Father with such a minor concern. He took the light throbbing pain with him to bed, a memento of his first successful spirit raising, and in the morning the pain had faded so that he hardly remembered it at all.  
  
xXx  
  
“I think you're ready.”  
  
Hanna would have sworn that his heart stopped for just a moment. “Really?” he asked the priest, mouth hanging open slightly. After all this time, after years of studying, learning, practicing, and being told 'not yet', he had almost stopped expecting that Father Morris would _ever_ deem him ready.  
  
The man smiled, chuckling at Hanna's surprise. “Yes, I really think you're ready. It will take me a while to gather all that we need; you'll want the highest quality of ingredients, won't you? But I think we can go ahead with the ritual in the next week.”  
  
Father Morris' words sounded distant in Hanna's head, he was so overwhelmed by the prospect of finally getting to see his parents again. His imagination was going wild. What would he say to them? What would they say to _him_? Had they been in Heaven this whole time? None of the other spirits had ever had anything to say on that matter, so the same would probably apply for Mr. and Mrs. Cross, but... He just hoped they were well, that their spirits had found peace in whatever afterlife they had gone to. He hoped --Good Lord, he hoped!-- that they would tell him once and for all that they were free of the awful demonic creature that had taken them from him. He just wanted them to be happy.  
  
“...and we should leave early to secure the area. I don't know the habits of that village as well as I might like. ...You didn't hear a word of that, did you?”  
  
Hanna blinked back into the present. “Huh? Oh, sorry Father,” he said with a sheepish grin. “I just... You don't know how excited I am!”  
  
“I understand,” Morris said. “I'm looking forward to it myself, to see the culmination of your studies. It has been a good few years, teaching you.”  
  
The young man flushed at the praise, glad the priest felt that way as well. He didn't know what he'd have done if it weren't for Father Morris. He hoped he could do the man proud with this next spell, show that all their combined efforts were really worth something.  
  
As he'd said, it took the priest several days to gather what they needed and arrange the trip to the village where Hanna had been raised, where his parents were buried. It was less than an hour away by cart-horse, but they decided to make a full-day event of it rather than sneaking in under the cover of night. There was a very small chapel in the center of the village, and the pastor there was more than happy to let them stay in the guest room at the back, welcoming them warmly.  
  
“Welcome home, Hanna!” he said, embracing him in a way that was familial but suggested he definitely hadn't forgotten why the boy had left in the first place. “It is good to see you doing so well, after everything.”  
  
“It is nice to be back,” Hanna responded, taking in the once-familiar sights. His family's house was another mile down the road, and his father hadn't been the sort of come into town any more than was necessary, but Hanna had visited the village with his mother often enough to consider it a part of his home. Now there were one too many negative memories associated with the area for it be truly comfortable, but it was still good to see the place again.  
  
After a quick reunion with a few of the more prominent figures in town, Father Morris bid Hanna lead the way to the cemetery, a shady lightly-wooded plot of land on a hill off behind the few small stores that lined one side of the road through town. They meandered through the rows of headstones, Hanna attempting not to look anxious, until they came upon an aptly-designed cross-shaped marker bearing the names of Hanna's ill-fated parents.  
  
Hanna took a few minutes to gaze at the inscriptions and the scenery. It was nice here. Wind was blowing softly through the trees and rustling the little wildflowers that had grown up in front of the headstone. He was glad they weren't intending to dig it up. Their peace had been disturbed enough.  
  
“Why don't you stay here for a while?” Morris suggested. “I will gather the rest of what we need.”  
  
“Thank you,” Hanna said, barely raising his voice enough to be heard over the breeze. He was eager to get on with the ritual, but he also craved a little more of this quiet time. He had never had the chance to mourn his parents in the traditional way. Careful not to crush any of the tiny flowers, he sat there and folded his legs in front of him. Father Morris left with a swift nod at Hanna's back, and there was silence.  
  
There was little to do for the rest of the afternoon, as they couldn't begin to set the spell up until after all the townsfolk had gone off to bed, so Hanna sat for hours in the cemetery, absorbing the calm atmosphere. Nobody bothered him; he was left blissfully alone with his thoughts which, for once, seemed entirely his own. Ever since the horrible event which had started all of this, his mind was ever on his goal, to the point where he felt his thoughts almost _belonged_ to the magic and were, at best, on loan to him. It manifested in a feeling of anxiousness that he could never shake, even when things were going well, a feeling he hadn't even been entirely aware of until now. He hoped that perhaps he could be rid of the restlessness once he saw his parents again.  
  
When the sun had finished sinking down into the swaying fields of wheat, Hanna returned to the chapel to find it utterly empty of people. The pastor had gone home to his family, most likely, but Hanna had assumed Father Morris would be waiting for him there. He ate a simple dinner from a basket someone had left for them in the guest room and went over his plans for the evening in his head until the priest returned.  
  
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Hanna,” he said, smoothing his hair. It looked like he'd been out in the fields picking the ingredients fresh and had stumbled in a rabbit hole on his way back.  
  
Hanna shook his head, none too upset. “It's no problem. We should wait until everyone's been down for an hour or two anyway, right? You should have something to eat.”  
  
“I'm fine, thank you,” Father Morris responded. He took a seat in the empty chair on the other side of the small table and pulled out his tiny leather journal. He spent the next several hours flipping through it in a distracted way, and Hanna did his best not to let the man's apparent unease influence his state of mind. The ritual was a bit risky, he understood, but he felt there was no point in being apprehensive now, determined as he was to see it through. If they took the proper precautions, waiting long enough and being discrete enough, there was little chance of anything going wrong this evening.  
  
A part of Hanna wanted to strike up conversation with Father Morris, go over the plan once more or ask him what he thought of his hometown, but the priest seemed to have retreated into his own mind and Hanna didn't want to disrupt whatever he might be thinking about, so he counted and measured and re-counted and re-measured their materials until he felt that it was time.  
  
“Father, do you think it's late enough?”  
  
Morris snapped to attention, as if startled by Hanna's presence. His face softened after a moment, and he nodded. “I believe so. Lead the way.”  
  
The nearby shop windows were all dark, and though there were a few homes clustered together down the street from the cemetery, they were far enough away that nothing short of a banshee's screams should rouse them. A few cats gazed at them lazily as they made their way down the road, but no humans were around to witness them.  
  
When they reached the grave site and began laying out the circle, Hanna considered whether he ought to remove the sparse bed of tiny wildflowers he had sat in earlier, but decided against it. Certainly, it was best when their work-surface was flat and clear, and Hanna was doing everything else that was within his power to make sure this spell went right (from using the rarest of ingredients to setting up as close as possible to the Cross's bodies, even though it wasn't strictly necessary for a spirit raising to be anywhere near the corpse), but he didn't feel he could disturb the little lives that had grown up so innocently and unknowingly here. He didn't mention it to Father Morris, simply laying the lines of the circle in between blades of grass and stems of flowers.  
  
For his part, Father Morris mostly stood back and watched Hanna work. It was the young man's spell, after all, the culmination of his all his previous efforts, and they both silently agreed that it should be Hanna who did the majority of it. He did step in occasionally and add small details or straighten lines while Hanna was working on another section, but otherwise adhered to their unspoken agreement.  
  
It was almost time, and Hanna's mouth was dry, all the usual moisture having gathered further down in his throat in a lump that made breathing a conscious effort. “This is it,” he said to himself as he knelt in the grass.  
  
“You're more than capable, Hanna,” Father Morris reminded him. “Your magic has grown immensely in the past years and your desire is strong. You cannot fail.”  
  
Hanna looked back over his shoulder at the man. It was nice to have someone who so fully believed in him, someone who knew all his fears, all his mistakes, and still encouraged him. “Thank you, Father,” he said, meaning it more than ever.  
  
Father Morris nodded, then stepped back. “I think it best that I leave you to finish the rest on your own. I'll keep watch down the hill so that nobody interrupts you.” The priest took the path out of the cemetery and down the slope toward the town until he was out of Hanna's sight.  
  
Some part of him felt as if he could stay here all night admiring the way the moonlight slid over the glossy headstone and illuminated the unobscured edges of the circle, but Hanna didn't have to remind himself that he had come here to achieve a different kind of peace. He took the small knife from his pocket, the same one he had used at his first spirit-raising, and took a deep breath before carving steadily into his palm. A few drops may have sufficed for any random spirit, but to ensure the success of this spell Hanna was prepared to give as much as he could spare. He gritted his teeth through the pain until a small puddle coated the bottom of a porcelain dish set carefully between the inner and outer lines of the circle. He set the knife aside and clenched his fist to stop the flow, then finally recited the familiar incantation once more.  
  
“ _Retornasti ad me, o Mercy et Joseph Cross spiritus de excelso caelorum ubi cubes!_ _”  
  
_ As expected, two swirls of spectral mist came up in the middle of the large circle, spiraling like water in a funnel until they formed distinct, memorable pictures. Mr. and Mrs. Cross, as Hanna remembered them, stood before him, floating a few inches above the ground and obeying their own special sense of gravity. They appeared confused for just a moment before they saw Hanna and, with a quick look toward each other, seemed to understand.  
  
“Oh, Hanna...,” Mrs. Cross said softly, gazing down at him in a sort of fond sadness.  
  
“Mother...,” he whispered, a bit overwhelmed to see her again, and looking anything other than frightened to death. He reached for her instinctively, but his hand passed through her wispy form. “I can't believe it's you. And father. I--. I missed you so much. The both of you... You're well?”  
  
Mr. Cross shook his head, an almost melancholy look upon his face, a matching set with his wife. “My son, there is no need to worry for us anymore. What is this you've done to call us back?”  
  
“It's... magic!” Hanna said, a little apprehensive about admitting it to his beloved parents for fear that they'd react like everyone else, even though there was no way to hide it from them now. “Father Morris taught me after... I- I went to live at the church, and he told me I could speak with you again. I know most people think magic is bad but... I had to see you! I had to make sure you were okay after... after the demon.”  
  
It seemed Mr. Cross was even more concerned to hear those words from his son, but he did not acknowledge them directly. He gaped at Hanna for a short moment, as if something was caught in his throat. “Are _you_ alright?” he finally asked, struggling to find the words.  
  
“I'm fine,” Hanna told his parents, wishing those looks of worry would be gone from their faces. The throbbing in his palm brought the pain back to his attention, reminding him that 'fine' was at best a white lie.  
  
“We should have known,” Mrs. Cross said, looking at her husband. “We should have--” She frowned, an expression of annoyance playing on her face like when she would come home to find too late that she'd been overcharged at the market. “We should have _said_ something. Before.”  
  
Mr. Cross nodded his agreement. “We should have moved. Staying was a risk we should not have taken.” He turned his attention back on his son. “Hanna, you are very smart,” he said, giving a kind, genuine smile. “We are so proud of you. But--”  
  
“...What?” Hanna asked quietly when his father's words came to a halt again. He felt confused. He was infinitely glad to see them again, and to hear that they were proud was beyond his highest hopes, but he hadn't expected the stuttered, cryptic lecture that his father was trying to give.  
  
“You are... too _trusting_ ,” Mr. Cross managed, disappointed in himself that he would ever have to admonish his child for such a trait.  
  
Hanna frowned, thinking back on his life and wondering who it was his father thought he was supposed to mistrust. Already he was not as open with people as he would like; the brothers and sisters back at the church who he wanted to speak honestly with, he kept his secrets from them despite his aching loneliness. Was that not enough mistrust?  
  
Clearly, Hanna's chastised expression was not what his parents had been hoping from Mr. Cross's warning, so his mother tried a different approach. “You must have... learned much,” she said, her voice light despite the lingering annoyance over her difficulty with the words.  
  
“Yes,” Hanna replied, raising his face to her. “I've studied for years with Father Morris.”  
  
“Did he...” Mrs. Cross stopped again, like every short phrase was tiring to her incorporeal form. “...say anything ...about us?”  
  
Hanna shook his head. “He said he didn't really know you very well.”  
  
The light of Mr. Cross's ghostly figure flared slightly. “ _We_ know _him_ quite well,” he gritted out.  
  
This was news to Hanna, with the intensity with which his father seemed to mean it. He was aware that they'd met before, when they'd all gone for Christmas mass when he was a child, but his father had stopped attending when Hanna was still quite young, sticking to the small, less-impressive chapel nearby, if at all, and he and his mother had quit traveling to the church a few years later. It sounded now as if perhaps they hadn't gotten along well. It seemed strange to Hanna that such kind and likeable people would ever be at odds.  
  
But at least, if they knew much about him, then maybe they knew about his magic. And if they knew about his magic and did not call to have him put on trial for it, then perhaps that meant they had a not-unfavorable opinion of it. “You know about his powers?” Hanna asked, not terribly afraid of spilling Father Morris' secret because, if his parents hadn't known before and _did_ in fact have an unfavorable opinion of it, there really wasn't much they could do about it now.  
  
“His powers--...” Mr. Cross seemed to have much more to say on the matter, but he stopped abruptly and reconsidered. “Yes, we knew. But we did not agree.”  
  
Though _why_ , Hanna had to ask himself, would his parents feel that way? They were so smart and understanding, and even if the rest of the entire world thought magic was bad, if there was anyone who was going to understand the truth of it, Hanna felt it would have to be his parents. And perhaps it was a bit late now, but he wanted very much to make them see the light of it.  
  
“I know what everyone says, but magic is... it's not bad! It was the only way I could see you again.” He implored them to listen.  
  
“Not that,” Mr. Cross said, forcing out the incomplete phrase. “It's... not just that. Hanna, it's...” He searched for the words he needed, starting several times to finish his sentence before the silence overtook him. “It's dangerous...!” he eventually managed.  
  
Hanna couldn't help but disagree. In the several years he'd been working magic, he had never once come to harm. At least, not any significant harm. It seemed to him that the spells were quite safe if you knew what you were doing. Unless, of course, his father had meant the danger of being discovered which, to the dismay of his younger more idealistic self, seemed unlikely to go away.  
  
“I'm careful,” he promised them. “I know not to tell others or do magic where I can be seen. Don't worry, I won't get myself in trouble. Father Morris taught me well.”  
  
“No,” his father insisted, frustration causing his spirit form to quiver. “He has--!” Again, he stopped. Instead of casting around for a better word, he changed directions entirely. “Hanna, was it you who cast this spell?”  
  
“Mostly,” Hanna said. “Father Morris helped some. Just because we wanted it to be perfect. Normally, I'd do it on my own.”  
  
Mr. Cross wasn't concerned with his son's attempts to defend his skill. “Which parts were not your doing?” he asked.  
  
Hanna wasn't sure, and he wasn't sure why it mattered, since his and the priest's spells were exactly the same, other than maybe a few insignificant fluctuations in the young man's style. But Mr. Cross seemed adamant that Hanna answer him. His still-worried gaze was intense. “I can look?” he suggested, figuring that he may be able to notice some slight differences in lines drawn by the Father. His parents seemed satisfied enough by that answer, though they still appeared anxious in a way he'd never seen a spirit look before.  
  
Again, it occurred to Hanna that this wasn't quite how he'd imagined this night for all those years. His parents' unease was making the whole scene feel quite surreal, and their stunted, strange way of speaking was not at all like the fluid intelligent way they had talked when they were alive. It made him wonder if he had messed up somehow in this spell, if there was an interrupted line somewhere that made their summoning incomplete. He began to look hard at all the circles and runes drawn along the outer and inner edges of the shape, nearly forgetting that he was supposed to be looking for Father Morris' additions.  
  
The lines were all fine, the weights consistent and the shapes even. Hanna was in top form tonight, the quality of his work indistinguishable from his master's. For the life of him, he couldn't find any area where either of them had made a circle too oblong or forgotten to close it off. But when he stepped back and looked at it as a whole instead of focusing on the tiny details, he noticed a rune he was unfamiliar with. He had missed it before because it took the place of the cooperation charm they often added. Of course they had no need for that charm today; his parents had no reason not to answer his questions honestly. But normally they would have simply left the space empty.  
  
“What does it read...?” Hanna asked himself, mumbling under his breath as he tried to compare this rune to the ones he knew, guessing what Father Morris may have intended and cross-checking it against similar designs.  
  
Mr. Cross seemed to want to answer his son's rhetorical question, but as he opened his mouth to respond, both he and Mrs. Cross appeared to hear a startling noise in the distance. Before Hanna knew it, he had been yanked forward into the middle of the circle, not physically but almost magnetically. He toppled face-first into the grass as a high-pitched shrieking whine enveloped him. When he raised his head, he saw that the human-shaped forms of his parents had dissolved into a small hurricane of spiritual energy that circled around him viciously.  
  
“What is going on?!” he yelled over the sounds of the wind and the screeching.  
  
The cyclone of his parents had no answer for him, and he sat surrounded, holding his breath for what seemed a short eternity until it stopped and the nebulous mass of spirit coalesced into two wobbly human shapes again.  
  
“Hanna!” they both yelled, surging toward him. “Are you all right?”  
  
“What was that?” he asked. He felt extremely frazzled, both drained and full of an energy he didn't understand. He scrubbed his hands back through his hair and righted his glasses and tried to breathe.  
  
His mother reached for him, and though her ghostly hands sunk right into his shoulder, he felt comforted by the gesture. “You are in danger,” she told him, firmly but sad.  
  
“You must go,” his father said. “Far from here or that church.”  
  
Those pleas were far too cryptic for his liking. Hanna trusted his parents explicitly, but needed more from them. His knees felt weak as he tried to stand, his back trembling under the heavy weight of confusion. “I don't understand. What am I in danger from?”  
  
His father's attempt to explain was again interrupted before it could begin, when a loud rustling in the bushes caught their attention. Father Morris stumbled out of them, quickly as if he'd been running for his life, but with a deliberate heaviness in his limbs that made it seem he was caught in invisible snares. He grunted like an animal as he dragged his way towards them through air that must have felt as thick as water.  
  
“Hannibal...!” he growled, voice like a swarm of bees. He fixed his gleaming eyes on the young man.  
  
“Dear God,” Mrs. Cross whispered as she tried to clutch her son closer to her.  
  
“Go, Hanna!” his father yelled.  
  
But Hanna could not. His feet were stone and his spine was a blade of grass. It was all he could do to keep himself upright.  
  
The priest staggered a few steps closer. The spirits of Mr. and Mrs. Cross stood firmly before their son, ready to do whatever they could to buy him further time to flee. Father Morris stumbled to a halt several yards away. “Hannibal...!” he growled again, but he made no attempt to reach the young man. Instead he brought his hand up before him and stretched until his fingers bent and twisted and the ends became talons. His eyes glazed over momentarily as he gurgled out a strangled “no...!”, but the unnatural focus returned quickly and he locked his attention on Hanna before sinking his claws straight through his own chest.  
  
There were several screams, though Hanna would never remember if one of them was his. His throat felt so tight he could barely breathe. Father Morris lay there still as the blood seeped out of him and slowly trickled through the grass toward Hanna. His parents backed away from it.  
  
“You cannot stay here,” his father said, and in the conscious part of his brain, behind the horror-soaked silence, Hanna knew why. The people in this town had not believed a demon was responsible the first time someone dear to him was found dead in a pool of fresh blood; a second time would be no better. And for him to have been spared in both instances? People are hesitant to blame murder on a child, but the years between had put him close enough to adult that he stood little chance of being seen as inherently innocent any longer.  
  
“Where can I go?” he asked quietly, gaze still stuck in the nothingness above the body before him. He wasn't asking for an answer; he wasn't sure there was one. Both homes he'd ever had, both families, had been cruelly ripped from him, and he couldn't think that anywhere else in the world even existed for him now.  
  
His father tried to catch his eye. “Anywhere,” he told him. “Any place but here.”  
  
“A city,” Mrs. Cross provided. “Far from here where nobody will recognize your name.”  
  
Hanna knew what she meant, that rumors would spread, if not warrants for his arrest, that he should retreat far enough away for a hundred other Crosses to stand in the way of any pursuers, but all he could think of was what Father Morris had called him in his dying breath, and the horrible way he had looked at him. Hanna knew with a certainty born of experience who that had really been.  
  
His parents were on either side of him, expressions pleading. “You must go now! Send us away and go!”  
  
Where had the demon gone, now that its host was dead? Was it waiting nearby, hoping for a chance? Was it still whispering his name?  
  
Hanna looked at his mother and his father, the reasons for everything he had done in the past years. He loved them so that his heart shuddered at the thought of losing them again. But they were right. He felt misfortune on the air, a sinister wind, and as much as he missed them he was not ready to join them in eternity. He looked at them for a long minute, hoping all his love for them and his explanations and promises could cross the silence between them and they would simply understand. Then he grabbed his knife and sliced sideways with it like a garden trow through the circle into the cold damp earth, and tried to keep his crying quiet when they disappeared.  
  
He spared one last look for Father Morris' body, just a split second because he couldn't process any more, before he gathered what little he had and headed off toward the far end of the town. There was a fork in the road there. The left tine went through the fields and eventually passed a house he had once considered his. Back down the stem through the town led to the church and the now-shepherdless flock he had nearly opened up to. Last, the road wound off somewhere past what he knew of the world, towards other towns and cities and opportunities. Alone, he took the right path.


	9. Chapter 9

He blinked, or at least he tried to, but his eyelids felt like they were glued together. Not with super-glue or anything, just that gross pasty stuff that elementary school kids apparently liked to eat. His eyes also felt like someone had sprinkled chili powder in them, which was unlikely because, first of all, he didn't own any chili powder and, second of all, who would do that? So then he must have been crying. He hoped he hadn't also been screaming.  
  
“Hanna, are you alright?”  
  
Even on the best of days, Hanna wouldn't have been able to see the person who was sitting beside him, given that it was still dark and he didn't have his glasses. Today, with the nasty paste in his eyes, it was beyond impossible. But he'd know that voice anywhere, and the papery hand that held his was pretty familiar, and last he checked there was only one other person in his apartment (unless his friend had hosted a party while he was asleep which, frankly, seemed marginally less likely than having chili powder sprinkled in his eyes), so he knew it was the zombie.  
  
“I'm fine, uh, Winfield,” he said, though the creakiness of his voice did not make it especially convincing, not to mention it was an outright lie because honestly he felt _terrible_. “D'ya happen to know where my glasses are?”  
  
“You're shaking,” the zombie said, sounding concerned. Still, he removed his hand from where it was holding Hanna's and replaced it with his glasses. Hanna put them on and was a little disappointed that Winfield didn't take up his hand again. “You were crying in your sleep,” he said. “I was worried.”  
  
Hanna shook his head, though not at anything in particular. He wished he could shake hard enough to dislodge the memories. “It was just a bad dream,” he said to both himself and his friend. “I mean, it was a memory but... it's all in the past, right? There's no reason to be scared of it anymore.” Even as he said the words, he knew he didn't believe a bit of it.  
  
“Do you want to talk about it?” Winfield asked. With his glasses on, Hanna could just see him now, and only still because his glowing eyes illuminated his face. He looked more concerned than probably anybody else in the whole world had ever been for Hanna, at least in the past hundred years. It didn't make him feel any more secure, but it did make him feel better. Better than horrible was still bad, but it was something.  
  
Somewhat to his own surprise, Hanna _did_ want to talk about it. “Yeah,” he said, sitting up straighter. “Yeah... But I think I want breakfast first. And a shower. Probably not in that order.”  
  
The zombie nodded. “That's fine.” He scooted back away from the mattress, giving Hanna room to pull himself out of bed and stumble out to the bathroom.  
  
He started the hot water right away, but then he took a long minute just to lean on the cool porcelain of the sink. He felt ill, really physically sick, and he was worried he was going to toss his pancakes from two mornings ago if they weren't already digested. (He wasn't sure how his digestive system worked these days.) The cold was nice on his arms and forehead and it calmed his stomach enough for him to raise his head without feeling like the motion was going to cause any sort of problems. The mirror hadn't fogged up yet, and his reflection was there staring back at him, mostly clear through the gunk remaining in his eyes. The man in the glass looked... like he always had, barely a man at all, certainly not nearing two-hundred. As always, he was silent, staring back with that look in his eyes like he hoped you were going to give him some answers. Hanna didn't have any for him. He took his glasses off and looked away before removing his shirt and the rest of whatever he'd fallen asleep in, and got in under the spray of hot water.  
  
It was warm, melting. It was relaxing to his tired muscles, who felt like they'd been running from some terror all night. But that was dreams for you. The water massaged them back into shape, though his nerves were still running wild and pumping unnecessary adrenaline into them, trying their best to undo all the water's hard work.  
  
His mind was a little clearer now as the stress faded from his body. The dream came back to him in images and sounds rather than just the feeling of despair he'd awoken with. The amorphous hurricane of his parents' spirits, the howling wind, the look in their eyes when they pleaded with him, the last time he heard their voices, the priest's body lying gutted in the grass, the echo of the whisper of his name---  
  
No.  
  
He shut it out and focused on the water. He washed methodically, head to toe and everything in between except the mess of mistake he'd grown to purposefully forget. Done enough, he turned off the knobs, rung out his hair, and wrapped his waist in a threadbare towel. Like instinct, he threw on yesterday's shirt before donning his glasses and returning to the room. Winfield had made himself conveniently absent, so Hanna wasted no time finding a new set of adequately clean clothes and joining him in the living room.  
  
The zombie was perched on the couch's right arm and balancing the laptop expertly on his knee. He looked up when Hanna entered the room, then looked back down again. “Are you feeling any better?”  
  
“I think,” Hanna said, though he did not in fact let himself think about it.  
  
“Do you want me to make you something to eat?” Winfield asked, glancing up from the screen and quickly looking back down, not as if he had something really interesting he was reading, but like he didn't want to look at Hanna too hard or for too long lest he hurt him somehow.  
  
Hanna went about locating his shoes and his wallet. “No,” he answered, though it was almost close enough to a 'nah' to tip over into casually dismissive. “I'm thinking a diner.” He didn't ask the zombie if he wanted to go with him, but he assumed correctly that the man would come along, invitation eternally implied by this point.  
  
It was still dark out. Not even a touch of blue colored the eastern edges of the sky as they made their way down the street to a diner on the corner of a nearby intersection. The building was stuffed right up to the edge of the sidewalk, with a tiny parking lot isolating it from the tall buildings at its back. During daylight hours, it was a hellish place to try to get a seat, but at this time of morning (or night, depending on your schedule; for Hanna, it was usually still night) it was fairly private.  
  
The waitress blinked at them tiredly as they came in but didn't make any sort of comment about it being too early for Halloween or anything like the day-time staff might have, obviously plenty used to dealing with weirdos. She continued whatever she was doing behind the counter and let her two new customers seat themselves and get acquainted with the menu for a few minutes.  
  
“I love this place,” Hanna said distractedly while they browsed through the menus. “Not sure how they're still in business with a health and safety rating of 73, but hey. I'm thinking the All Star, hash-browns covered and covered some more.”  
  
Winfield looked like he'd just failed his foreign-language mid-term after a good long cram session, but he put aside his failure and forged on. “Should I order something? To seem more normal?”  
  
Hanna shrugged. “I don't think these guys care.”  
  
So the zombie returned his menu to its holding spot on the condiment rack. It wasn't interesting enough to hold his attention if it wasn't required of him. Hanna, though, was, so he turned his gaze on him and waited quite patiently. The waitress came for their order and didn't ask for clarification of the hash-brown slang. Hanna chatted idly at his partner as he waited on the food to be prepared. He wasn't sure what was even coming out of his mouth, but it filled the silence and elicited no strong reactions from any parties present, so he imagined it was fine. The food was delivered before too long, and he went after the eggs with fervor, crumbling the bacon into them and sopping up the leftovers with the toast. The hash-browns went next, and the zombie learned that double-covered just meant lots of cheese. Only the waffle was left by the time Hanna slowed down. He stared at it for a minute, his vision narrowing in on the little square divots before he opened the margarine packet and carefully filled each hole with just the right amount of butter-flavored spread.  
  
“D'you remember what we were talking about last night?” he asked, eyes locked on the waffle, hands still fixed to the task of preparing it perfectly.  
  
“Demons,” Winfield said, nodding, although Hanna was so expertly avoiding looking at anything other than his plate that he didn't notice. “I remember. I wondered if you might have nightmares after telling me of them. You seemed quite bothered.”  
  
Hanna scoffed, though he felt bad about making such a scathing sound in response to anything his friend had to say, especially after the man was so supportive. It was just that... 'bothered' was beyond an understatement. 'Haunted' was more accurate. “Mm, yeah. I wasn't... it wasn't really a nightmare I had, it was a memory. From when I was a kid.”  
  
“It sounded like a nightmare,” the zombie said, emphasizing 'sounded', but not enough to italicize it in print.  
  
“Yeah, it sorta was,” Hanna agreed. “I mean, not that my whole childhood was bad. Not even the whole dream was bad. It was good enough on the whole that, you know, it just made the bad parts even worse... if that makes sense.” And that was just how life was, right? You have ups and you have downs, but the higher the ups, the lower the downs. The life he forged after his childhood was an even more striking example of it, though it had evened out to almost a flat-line since-- in the last hundred or so years.  
  
The zombie nodded, understanding. Again, Hanna was focusing on his waffle, cutting it into pieces much smaller and more precise than he almost ever had (under normal circumstances, it got cut roughly into fours and quickly drenched in syrup before being shoved into his mouth, and only because waffles (unlike pancakes) were too thick to consume whole), so he didn't see. He heard the concerned curiosity though, when his friend asked, “what happened?”  
  
A fairly direct question, and it deserved a direct answer, even if he thought he could get away with skirting the issue. No, he didn't want to anymore, he needed this out. So he forged right on.  
  
“When I was a kid, well, twelve-- that's still a kid right?-- my parents were killed by a demon. No one really believed me except the priest at the church that took me in, Father Morris. He started teaching me magic, y'know, mostly necromancy, so I could talk to my parents again. That was all I wanted for years.” Hanna stopped his monologue for just a moment and glanced up to make sure Winfield was still listening; he was, of course. He looked back off to the side as he continued. “So eventually I knew enough and I _did_ get to talk to them, and that was... good. Crazy. I dunno, it seemed like something was off. But I barely got to talk to them at all because then Father Morris... I mean, he was killed by a demon too, so I had to leave.”  
  
“I don't understand,” Winfield said, and Hanna couldn't blame him. The more he thought about it, and the way he'd described it, the situation did seem a little convoluted. It was hard to want to describe it the way people would have seen it though, because it simply didn't carry the same weight as what Hanna _knew_.  
  
“Er... demons... they... possess people, and then they...” Hanna looked down at his hand; it twitched inadvertently. “They kill them with their own hands, and then disappear. It's worse than killing with magic. There's nothing left, no evidence that the demon was ever there. It just looks like a messy suicide. ...Or a murder. There's no reason for anybody to believe it's supernatural. So, that's part of why I had to run away, because they might have thought I did it.”  
  
“What was the other part?”  
  
Hanna felt his eyebrows raise as his mouth twisted into a grimace. “The demon was still out there.” He didn't mention the chilling way it had said his name, that he felt it reaching for him, but anyone would agree that he was right to get as far away as possible, just because of its proximity.  
  
“Mm.” The zombie was looking hard at Hanna (which Hanna _did_ see, from the corner of his eye). As much as he was capable of, he looked concerned. He'd been looking like that a lot lately. Hell, he'd looked like that a lot back in the day too. Hanna wondered if maybe he ought to try to stop worrying him, or maybe just worry him to death (haha, no, not actually funny) all at once and get it over with. “That sounds bad,” Winfield said, displaying his mastery of the art of understatement. “But you said some good came of that?”  
  
_Had_ Hanna said that? It was true, yes, definitely. Despite the horror of it all, good _did_ come of it, even if that good had not lasted. Better to have loved and lost, they said, right? He looked up at his companion. Well, all of that was sort of irrelevant now, wasn't it? “The magic I learned from Father Morris was kind of my saving grace,” Hanna told Winfield. “I mean, yeah, it was kind of what fucked everything up too, but without it I wouldn't be here, and I wouldn't have met y-- my partner. Probably.” He stumbled and recovered himself so quickly over his words that he didn't think anyone would be able to notice even if they'd been expecting it.  
  
“The one you mentioned before? Who you 'parted ways' with?”  
  
“Yeah,” Hanna said, trying not to look straight at the zombie or seem like he was actively avoiding looking at him, which was a hard balance to strike.  
  
Hanna was, of course, not looking straight at the zombie, so it wasn't totally clear to him what the expression was that quickly passed over his face, something more than curiosity. “They must have been quite important to you, if meeting them was enough to surpass your regrets.”  
  
Possibly, Hanna could have tried to claim that he was not a regretful person by nature, but it was so untrue that Winfield was already obviously aware of the fact. (He _tried_ to have no regrets, but it was damn near impossible, in a situation like his.) His friend had hit the nail on the head: the detective _was_ what kept him from regretting the entire mess of his life. “You know what? He was,” Hanna said. “I never really told him, or thanked him. God I wish I would have listened to him. All of this... it's really my fault.”  
  
Winfield clearly didn't know all the details (or even half the details) of 'all of this', but he said with an authority that was hard to doubt, “I'm sure he knew. And I'm sure he wouldn't blame you for all that has happened. Nobody could blame you.”  
  
_'You don't know,'_ Hanna almost wanted to say, but that was his fault too. Instead he said, “Thanks,” lowering his head again. “But _I_ blame me. I know I could have done better.”  
  
“If you think so, then all you can do is start doing better now.”  
  
And there it was, the one truth to rule them all. Make a mistake? Do better next time. So far... well, he'd come so close to using blood magic he wasn't sure it didn't count, and he sure as hell hadn't been being honest. He could do better. He could do a lot better. “I think I will,” he told the zombie. “I'll start with you.” But what to start with? Even if he wanted to come entirely clean, where in the world was he supposed to begin?  
  
“Do you have some new ideas?” Winfield asked. “About my case?”  
  
“Er, no,” Hanna said. “Not really. I'm still not a hundred percent sure demons have anything to do with this. But even if it is... that, I've avoided them like the plague. I don't really know enough about them to figure out... anything. I wish I could talk to Father Morris.” But of course, the man was long dead. Longer dead than the one he currently shared a table with, and probably not preserved anywhere near so well. Hanna ate a few more pieces of his waffle. It had cooled down quite a bit, but the swirl of maple and butter flavor still made him feel a little better (or less bad, anyway), if only the tiniest bit.  
  
The zombie was thinking. He straightened his utensils and the salt and pepper shakers as he formulated an idea. “Couldn't you bring him back? That is something necromancers can do, isn't it?”  
  
Hanna had _definitely_ thought of it before, and not just when he needed the Father's advice. Morris had been extremely supportive of him, and sometimes Hanna just needed that. He craved it less these days, since he'd become close with Worth and Lamont, but still sometimes he wished he could talk with someone who knew his secrets, someone who didn't morally oppose being brought back from the dead. But Morris was so far gone that even if Hanna had been willing to go back on his promise to the detective, it would have been difficult to summon him, at least without a good few ounces of blood sacrifice. He clenched his hand and felt the stiff healing cut on his palm flex awkwardly. No, he wasn't going to do that again.  
  
“I _could_ ,” Hanna told the zombie. “But I'm trying to avoid that kind of magic. I sort of made a promise.”  
  
Winfield seemed to understand. At least, he very kindly didn't pry. “Perhaps he left behind some notes or books?” he helpfully suggested.  
  
“Maybe,” Hanna said, thinking back to the old church. For the sake of Morris' reputation, he hoped the priest hadn't left anything behind. He imagined the brothers and sisters cleaning out their rooms when word arrived that the Father had died and his apprentice had disappeared, finding the heavy leather-bound tomes full of incantations. The most dangerous ones were written in a half-Latin code, but it wouldn't take a magic-user to realize what it all meant. That was why he'd never gone back, much as he would have liked to visit Morris' grave... if they even gave him one. “No, probably not,” Hanna amended. “It was way too long ago anyway. I'd have better luck at the local library.”  
  
The zombie gave him a thoughtful look. “Should we try that?”  
  
Actually, Hanna had meant the comment to imply that getting the priests' notes would be nearly impossible, not that the library was a particularly great resource, but then he thought... _'why not?'_ Libraries were weird places, sort of a half-dead link between the quiet old world and the busy, technological modern one. They were, well, sort of like reapers, existing in a dusty space outside of time, a place only a few knew how to navigate. The dark corners might hold some secrets, protected for long years by the public's disinterest.  
  
“Sure,” he said with a shrug, as possibility lifted some of the weight from him. “It's as good a place as any to start.”  
  
So Hanna finished his waffle (it was good, and he instinctively almost offered some to his companion before biting his tongue; that was worse than offering bacon to a Jewish person. At least they were physically capable of eating it if they chose to. If you wanted to get technical, Winfield probably could as well, but it wasn't a good idea), then paid the bill. The waitress gave him a vaguely accusing but mostly disinterested look that could have meant... pretty much anything. Hanna added an extra dollar to her tip, in apology for whatever he'd done wrong; he wanted to remain on her good side for the next time he ate there.  
  
The sky outside had begun to lighten, the eastern horizon already a pale blue while the west was colored with a touch of pink. It looked quite pretty. Unfortunately, that meant it was still too early for the library to be open. “Uh, anywhere else you wanna go while we wait for normal operating hours?” Hanna asked the zombie, who stood between him and the fairly-busy road. (But not as busy as Hanna seemed to recall it normally was. Maybe it was a weekend? It was hard for him to remember which day of the week it was anymore, if he ever had.) “I forgot most businesses aren't open 24-7.”  
  
“Wherever you like,” Winfield said, again maddeningly acquiescent. But Hanna knew that he really actually did not mind, so he said, “Alright,” and led the way down the road.  
  
Walking together was nice, as Hanna had established multiple times in the past few days. It neither required nor precluded talking, as compared to sitting down somewhere, which seemed to do both somehow. And it casually made him remember the past in a way that was not painful. They had walked together down busy streets quite often, and commonly at this time of day. It was a good time for walking, especially if you were strange-looking or the sort that tended to attract attention, because although the roads and sidewalks were full, everyone was so preoccupied with getting where they were going that they didn't bother giving you more than maybe a second glance if they found you particularly interesting, and nobody could spare the time to actually bother you.  
  
The library was... about a mile away in _that_ direction, if Hanna remembered correctly, so he headed that way. There were mostly stores and office buildings between here and there, nothing good to waste their time on unless they wanted to window-shop or... oh. If they continued down the road they were on, they'd pass by a police station, wouldn't they? A police station, full of police officers, and other law-enforcement type things that were not all that much like what they had in the 19 th century, but were still similar enough to potentially spark a person's memory. A cop was a cop, after all. You could just about tell it by the way they walked, and the way they stared at you like you'd done something wrong. Hanna paused for a minute in his walking, but he hadn't been going so fast that Winfield crashed into him or anything. The man just brushed Hanna's arm with his elbow when he stopped less abruptly.  
  
“Is something wrong?” he asked.  
  
“Oh, uh, no. I just remembered they've been doing construction down that road.” Hanna looked side to side, trying to remember what was down either direction of the next cross-road. A grocery store, a gas station, and a strip mall on the left. The tag office, a quick clinic, and some restaurants on the right. Either was safe enough. He turned on his heel and went left; he didn't have a car or need medical attention, but groceries were always an option. The grocery store should be open by now, and if it wasn't then the gas station at least would be. They could just browse for a little while, maybe even see if there was anything Winfield felt like cooking. (That was something Hanna didn't think would be too dangerous for his friend to relearn, and he definitely wouldn't mind.) Then they could go up and take --what was it? North Hendon?-- a block or two and get to the library without going anywhere near the station. On the way back they could take the right and cut through the Middlebrook neighborhood back to--  
  
Hanna was, well, not _startled_ out of his course charting, but still surprised out of it, when he noticed the zombie was walking close by his side, almost like he was trying to avoid the throng of pedestrians (there was no throng; there were only a few other people on this stretch of sidewalk, and they were keeping a polite distance), or like it was a particularly cold winter morning and he was trying to stay warm (which it wasn't, and he wasn't). Stranger still, he was looking down at Hanna as they walked, not obviously with his head turned towards him or anything, but with his eyes. He looked away as soon as Hanna noticed, of course.  
  
“What? Is there something in my hair? Let me guess, I have syrup on my face.” He rubbed a hand over his face but didn't find any sticky spots. (To be fair, he had been more methodical than usual about his waffle eating this morning.)  
  
“No, there's nothing,” the zombie said, as he stared off toward the approaching intersection.  
  
“Then why were you looking at me?” Hanna asked, trying not to sound accusatory, because he definitely didn't mind.  
  
Winfield's mouth quirked into an ever so slight smile. “Should I not?”  
  
“Uh, no, you can!” Hanna said. “I was just wondering why.”  
  
It wasn't a direct question, so the zombie didn't answer it. Silently, Hanna praised his partner's deflection skills, though he hated having them used on him. They kept walking, and the zombie returned to quietly studying Hanna from the corner of his eye. If he wanted to look at him, it would have made more sense for the man to fall back a step into his usual place, but he stayed at Hanna's side and strained his eyes instead. What suddenly made him want to walk _next_ to Hanna, he wondered, but he didn't bother asking, since the man was obviously not in the mood to answer questions in any sort of straightforward manner.  
  
They went another block before they came to the side entrance of the Stop and Shop parking lot, which bore some resemblance to a post-apocalyptic wasteland. (That deadness made it vastly superior to, say, Walmart, in Hanna's opinion. He appreciated a place that was still open in the middle of the night, but even then Walmart was still too busy for his liking.) He thought about how much money he had on him (sixteen dollars and some-odd cents, and he really didn't want to spend it all because he didn't have enough savings at home to fall back on) and decided that shopping would probably just amount to a unique form of torture, but led the way toward the front of the store anyway. At least, until Winfield spoke up.  
  
“If you don't mind me asking, ...how did your partner die?”  
  
Hanna stopped in his tracks, still several store-fronts from the grocery store's automatic doors (though they were so squeaky, he could hear them from here). “I, uh...” His mind went blank for a moment before it came up with an appropriately useless response. “What makes you think he _died_?”  
  
The zombie knew Hanna was trying to weasel out of the question, and if he hadn't been already then the defensive answer would have put him in detective mode; it was clear from the look in his eyes, which Hanna forced himself not to look guiltily away from. (He'd been on both sides; he knew how this worked. Avoidance was as good as an admission of guilt.)  
  
“You cared about each other,” he said, like it was the most important thing in the world. “What other reason would you have to part from one another?”  
  
“Maybe he just got sick of me,” Hanna said with a vaguely nauseous laugh.  
  
Winfield shook his head. It was still just a slight, stunted movement, but it carried a lot of gravity. “No,” he said. “I very much doubt that.” He gave Hanna a sad smile, sorry and almost reprimanding.  
  
_'Look, you said you were gonna start doing better,'_ Hanna thought. _'So start now. Tell him.'_ Of course, despite whatever he'd told himself not just today but over the past week (and in that lifetime over a century ago), telling the truth was something the physical part of him resisted violently, and he wasn't sure how to get past that. He looked around, quickly, because whatever he ended up saying, he didn't want to keep Winfield waiting, and decided to take a seat at a round little stone table in front of the pizzeria they had stopped near. He sat down on the semi-circle bench carefully, because his mind was too busy elsewhere to really be keeping track of what his legs were doing.  
  
“The truth is,” Hanna began, and some little voice in the back of his head cackled viciously. _'What the heck do you know about telling the truth.'_ He ignored it and moved on, forcing the words out however they would go. “Truth is, I betrayed his trust, and it ended up getting him killed.”  
  
_'What did I tell you? White lies.'_  
  
“I'm sorry,” Winfield said, and how many times had he said that now? Still, it didn't seem any less honest than the first time. He looked mildly anguished, a pale reflection of how Hanna felt, even just thinking back on the day. The zombie came to sit down not quite opposite him, but nearly adjacent, maybe 4 o'clock, far enough not to be crowding him but close enough to reach out and squeeze his hand comfortingly. It seemed like he was considering it, but he left his hand on the table between them instead, just... there if Hanna needed it.  
  
“It's _really_ not your fault,” Hanna assured him. _'After all, if I'd just listened to you, none of it would have happened.'  
  
_ “I'm sure you didn't mean for it to happen.”  
  
Well that was one thing Hanna could admit to freely. “No. I thought I was doing the right thing, but I was stupid. I should have known better. I _did_ know better! I was just an idiot.”  
  
“Everyone makes mistakes,” Winfield said calmly, unusually understanding. ('Unusual' compared to most people, but not for him, especially not where Hanna was concerned.) Most people would have been rather more alarmed that you'd accidentally gotten someone killed, like, 'wow, that's rough. You must be some special kind of failure.' At least, that was probably what Worth would say.  
  
The vicious little voice in the back of Hanna's head pushed its way forward and gave a hollow laugh. “Yeah, everyone makes mistakes, but not everyone makes mistakes that get people murdered. That's a special talent of mine.” (A little twinge in his memory reminded him to check back in with Conrad at some point.)  
  
The zombie seemed to be weighing his words, obviously still invested in seeing this conversation through but not wanting to be any more insensitive than he had to. “Did you catch the killer?”  
  
Hanna reigned in another derisive snort. _'You have got to stop with those,'_ he told himself. _'Don't take your past frustrations out on Shivaji. He doesn't need any more reasons to think you're kind of an asshole.'_ Unfortunately, derisiveness was his only easy way of hiding remorse, so his answer came out sounding probably rather depressed. “Where would I even look?” he said, a rhetorical remark, not a question. “It was my fault. His blood was on my hands.”  
  
Responding to that sort of overwhelmingly self-incriminating statement was a tricky matter, but Shivaji had always been fairly adept at finding words that managed to be reassuring while not invalidating anyone's opinions. (That was part of the reason he'd managed to keep his job so long, since the 'mysterious' cases he and Hanna often found themselves trying to resolve usually turned out to be busts, as far as any officials knew. Statistics aside, he was just too likeably neutral to fire.) “I believe your partner wouldn't want you to dwell on it,” the zombie said.  
  
“I know.” And he did know that. Logically and emotionally, Hanna knew the detective would not have wanted him to dwell on past mistakes, even fatal ones. And it wasn't just because he'd _just said so._ (After all, saying people ought to forgive and then actually forgiving someone once you were in that situation yourself were two different things. There was no way to know for sure what you would do until you were there.) He knew the detective well enough that he knew the man would say... well, exactly what he said, even if he knew the truth.  
  
_'But then, why am I not telling him?'  
  
_ The disdainful, pessimistic part of him had an easy answer. _'Because what you know and what you_ know _are two totally different things. Nobody just forgives being murdered. That doesn't happen.'  
  
_ Hanna hardly listened to the voice's protests. _'Maybe I just need to trust him.'  
  
'Right, go ahead,' _ the angry voice grumbled. _'Ruin the good thing you've got going right now.'_ The fear it brought forward in Hanna's mind was strong, but it still wasn't quite enough to overpower the almost wondrous feeling that he might actually be able to open up to his partner with the whole truth (like, the _whole thing._ Even the things that he hadn't explicitly said _before_ ). _  
  
_ “Are you okay?” Shivaji asked, shocking Hanna back into the normal world. He realized he'd probably been zoning out pretty bad and making a really idiotic face or scowling off into the distance.  
  
“Oh, uh, yeah, I'm fine.”  
  
“I'm sorry for making you remember that,” the zombie said, and it took Hanna a good half-second to even remember what 'that' meant.  
  
“Huh? No, it's okay.” He wanted to say he was over it, or something really reassuring, but the first step to telling the truth was to stop telling lies... or something like that. So he didn't say anything more. A little silence grew between them, with Saturday (or maybe Sunday) morning grocery store parking lot sounds making the backdrop, as Hanna planned what to say.  
  
_'”I've been lying to you this whole time,”'_ he thought. _'That way he expects the worst, and when I tell him the truth, it won't seem so bad. Downright_ good _compared to if I brought him back to do my evil bidding or something, right? “You know that partner we were just talking about? Yeah, that's you. Surprise!” Er, well. Maybe that's too corny. Okay, how about, “What would you say if I told you I know someone you used to be friends with?” ... I should probably just make it up as I go.'_  
  
He was opening his mouth to say... he wasn't sure what exactly, but something, when Shivaji looked away from him and down at his feet with a zombie-strength expression of surprise. “Huh. Hello,” he said.  
  
Hanna ducked down to see why his friend was talking to his shoes and saw a cat, rubbing its face on the zombie's pants-leg and staring at _him._ “Oh. Hey, kitty.” The cat didn't meow or anything, but it took Hanna's greeting as a cue to come over and stand between the two of them where they didn't have to duck their heads under the table to see it. It was a cute cat (though really, when were cats ever not cute?), completely black as far as Hanna could see, with standardly yellow-green eyes. “Um, do you need something?”  
  
Unsurprisingly, the cat did not answer. It simply stood there and blinked up at him (occasionally sparing a glance for the zombie), padding back and forth on its little front paws like it was excited or the ground was too cold to touch for extended periods of time (which Hanna was pretty sure it wasn't).  
  
“It seems to like you,” Shivaji mentioned, smiling very gently down at the cat.  
  
“Yeah, I guess so,” Hanna said with kind of a shrug. “I've always kind of had a way with cats.”  
  
“Hmm.” The zombie continued to look at the little feline with his head tilted just slightly. “I think I may have liked cats as well. I think I might have had one... before.”  
  
A tiny nervous laugh escaped Hanna. “O-oh, yeah?” _He_ knew the man hadn't technically owned any cats, but he couldn't blame anyone for assuming he did, considering how much cat fur he probably had clinging to his clothes at any given time from Hanna's affectionate familiars. (They were particularly sweet on the detective, even compared to their owner. Hanna felt like they loved and respected him, but they _adored_ his friend.) “M-maybe you did,” he said, grinning kind of stupidly. “They've been popular pets since the Ancient Egyptians, after all. And something like one out of every three households has a cat, which is weird because you'd think it'd be _more_ , right? because who doesn't like cats?”  
  
_'You idiot,'_ some part of himself said at him tiredly. _'That would have been a great segue into, I dunno, admitting that you knew each other?'  
  
_ Of course, it was too late now, after rambling like that. Or maybe it wasn't too late, but the words just wouldn't come out of his mouth. _Those_ words wouldn't, but he was still chattering on even as he admonished himself. Luckily, Shivaji was just listening attentively with a fond look on his face (maybe he was still thinking about cats?), instead of insisting to know why Hanna was acting so strange all of a sudden.  
  
“So, anyway,” Hanna found himself saying, “Do you wanna go look around in the store? Or do you have more things you wanna ask me?”  
  
Shivaji blinked heavily in a way that seemed like an alternative to a nod, and stood from the stone bench. “I do, but I'm sure we will have time to talk about them later.”  
  
_'Oh, goody,'_ Hanna thought, roughly half sarcastic. He did want to keep talking with the zombie (even answering his questions; maybe that would be the easiest way to finally admit the truth), and he definitely was glad to put it off 'til later, and he thought maybe it would be better to get it all over with sooner rather than later, and unfortunately, those thoughts didn't all match up well. But when in doubt, it was always easiest just to go with the flow of the current situation, and the current situation dictated that he answer in a positive and casual manner and then go shopping. “Sure, whatever's cool,” he said, and maybe that was a little _too_ casual, but he went with it. He stood, careful not to step on the cat, who didn't seem the least bit concerned that the towering human creatures might be a danger to it. It watched as they continued to the grocery store, past a check-cashing place and a nail salon, but it didn't follow them as Hanna rather felt it might.  
  
The Stop and Shop was unsurprisingly un-busy, which meant both that there weren't many people around to stare at them and that every person who _was_ around _did_ stare at them. It was mostly a tired sort of stare though, especially from the various employees. Hanna could just about hear them thinking, 'Who the hell cosplays this early in the morning?' as they put out the fresh meats or rearranged magazine racks.  
  
Hanna would have liked to buy just about anything, but his wallet and the fact that they weren't going straight home after this stopped him from picking up more than a few snacks that were small enough for him to potentially fit in Shivaji's coat pockets.  
  
“Could you hold on to these for me?” he asked, as they exited the store some thirty-seven minutes or so later. “I'd just put 'em in a bag, but the library doesn't like you to bring food in and I don't wanna leave it outside for someone to run off with while we're researching.”  
  
“I don't mind,” the zombie said, good-natured as ever. He held open his coat so Hanna could fill one of the large inner pockets with candy bars.  
  
Hanna laughed to himself as he realized that the chocolate bars were at very low risk of melting in the pocket of someone who didn't generate any body heat. _'Well, that's one benefit,'_ he thought, though it was a rather pathetic attempt at seeing the bright side to your partner being undead.  
  
When they emerged from behind the screeching automatic doors, they saw that the cat was waiting for them by the cart return. Or maybe it was waiting for something else, or just sitting there for no particular reason. It certainly gave them a look that said, 'I was not waiting for you. In fact, I had forgotten you even existed.' Hanna was glad that even if human societies and mannerisms grew and evolved, cats never changed that much.  
  
In the short time they'd been shopping, the morning had ceased to be truly morningish and become mostly just dayish, and Hanna was pretty sure the library would be open by then, probably. So he lead the way and Shivaji followed, and the cat sat there and stared at them as they went. They exited the parking lot through the side entrance back onto the road from before and continued 'til they hit the intersection, where they crossed over to the other side of the road and went north on, right, it _was_ North Hendon. (Honestly, Hanna didn't usually bother to memorize road names, since he never intended to stay in one place more than a few years and just didn't have enough space in his head for all the street names of all the maybe forty-something cities he'd lived in. Navigating by landmarks was usually fine.) They followed that road up and then turned right after a few blocks, and arrived at the library after another few minutes. Shivaji had fallen back to Hanna's elbow as they walked, seemingly less interested in looking at him than he had been previously, although Hanna could still feel the zombie staring at the back of his head (or maybe in the general direction of his ear) on the occasion.  
  
The library didn't look very busy, or at least, there weren't many cars parked in the lot, but the door was unlocked when he tried it, so he had to assume that meant they were open. (A decal on the window by the door stated that the hours of operation were from Eight AM to Eight PM, but that sort of information was less than useful to people who weren't wearing watches. Or, well, most people probably checked the time on their phones these days. Hanna thought maybe he ought to get one, just for, y'know, whatever, or in case he had an emergency that was normal enough to admit to 911.)  
  
“Good morning,” the clerk at the front desk said distractedly as they walked in. She did a little double-take when she looked up from her computer and really noticed them, but she didn't say anything about Shivaji's appearance. Such was the way of a good public service worker, Hanna thought, even though she probably wasn't nearly so used to odd customers as were veteran diner waitresses, for example.  
  
They wandered off towards some empty tables which were mostly unoccupied, except for a teenager staring intently at a heavy textbook as if it held the answers to life's most inscrutable questions, and his rather massive backpack. Hanna continued all the way down the line of tables to one that seemed private enough before he turned to his friend, signaling their arrival.  
  
“Alright, I guess I'm gonna see what I can find about, uh, stuff. It's not the internet, but the library's pretty cool, so hopefully you won't be too bored while you wait.”  
  
“Do you want my help?” the zombie asked, and if he was the sort to really ever take offense at anything, he might have been offended that Hanna was trying to do all of this himself and not asking for assistance from the one person who probably _ought_ to be helping.  
  
But at this point, Hanna wasn't even sure just what it was that he was looking for, so he said, “Nah, thanks. Maybe after I've got a couple leads.”  
  
So Shivaji nodded and went off toward the general fiction section while Hanna went the opposite direction in search of the tomes he thought might be hiding in the back somewhere. This library wasn't especially new, but it also wasn't old enough to guarantee it had ever seen the age of book he was looking for, so he mentally crossed his fingers that a few had somehow migrated here.  
  
His search was not as fruitful as he hoped, but about as fruitful as he expected. There were a few old leather-bound books that looked as if they might have seen nearly as many years as _him_ (and almost as much trauma), but they were scattered throughout the building, organized in such a way that was probably logical and made sense to the librarians at least, but wasn't much use to Hanna. The books he was looking for sort of defied conventional genre labels, and even the differentiation between fiction and non-fiction was likely to get muddled without contextual publishing notes. Depending on who'd arranged them, stories of demonic possession were just as liable to be thrown in with 'horror' or 'religion'.  
  
'Religion' was where he started first, since 'magic' didn't have its own section and he didn't really want to ask the clerk if she could point him in the direction of “Exorcism for Dummies”. Most likely, he figured, if anything in this library could help him, it would be here. The biggest problem was sorting through the mass of religion-themed self-help books to get to the rarer historical ones, and then sorting through the ones that were really preachy self-help books in the guise of history to get to the actual unbiased documentaries, and _then_ sorting through documentaries to find anything that wasn't mostly conspiracy theory. (Those old books tended to be just what he was looking for, but he didn't want to dismiss the newer books either. There were bound to be reprints and newer compilations of old information.) He picked out a small stack of potentially-useful books and took them back to his spot, with a short detour to check on the zombie, just for his own peace of mind. (He was meandering through the high fantasy novels, but nothing seemed to have caught his attention yet.)  
  
The next few hours dragged by in a way that made Hanna feel like a beached whale: stuck, slowly crawling towards his destination, aware that his time was limited and unsure if there was any way to make it. Shivaji first returned not long after Hanna settled in to his first batch of books, bringing a pile of his own. He sorted through them rather quickly, and Hanna wondered (distracted from his own researching, _ugh, it was so boring_ ) if the zombie was simply uninterested in them, or if he was actually a super-fast reader. He returned each book to its rightful place and returned with a new collection some fifteen minutes later, and Hanna was hardly even a step closer to finding any useful information. It continued that way until Hanna had somehow mercifully found a few promising passages and the zombie had read probably half the library.  
  
“Ugh, thank god,” Hanna muttered to himself when he came across a section in an old book that confirmed something he'd read earlier. He rearranged his stacks to find the first book and flipped through it to the part in question, checking it against the other and finding that they matched. The differences in phrasing proved (...kind of) that the newer book was not just a copy, but the meaning of the content was the same. The reference it gave was a different book altogether, and that was enough testament to the info's credibility, at least to Hanna. With this chapter, he now had a good few pages of what seemed like it might be relevant and reliable data.  
  
“Have you found something?” Shivaji asked, setting down the book he was reading, which appeared to be a historical romance novel. (Hanna briefly skimmed the page it was open to; it was upside down, but he was pretty sure he saw the words 'heaving' and 'bodice' in there a couple times.)  
  
“Yes, _finally_ ,” he said, stabbing at the page with his finger. He glanced around to make sure nobody was hovering close by, before he explained. “This is a practical treasure trove of tips for dealing with possession! Look, it doesn't just go into exorcism, it has notes about how to spot demonic residue. I mean, _residue? Seriously?_ I never even thought about that! Of course, there's still the chance that it's not accurate, 'cuz this stuff is as fake as a three dollar bill most of the time, but a lot of the rest of the stuff they talk about is stuff I've done before, so I have a good feeling.”  
  
The zombie nodded. “I'm glad,” he said. He picked his romance novel back up but closed it again after flipping through it for another few moments before he placed it back on top of his stack and stood to take them back.  
  
“Hey, you can keep reading,” Hanna told him without raising his head. “I've still gotta actually read through all this. There's a couple of good chapters and I only skipped through them before. Maybe I should copy some of this down,” he said as an afterthought.  
  
“Alright,” Shivaji said, though he took the stack of books away anyway, apparently not that interested in heaving bodices after all.  
  
Hanna read feverishly, hoping and wishing for the veracity of these books to be as great as they seemed, but with an unease tickling the back of his mind (in an uncomfortable, uninvited way).  
  
_'”An oily residue may be left by a demon,”'_ he read silently, cross-checking it against the other books. _'What's this one say? “An unnatural perspiration.” Oh, that sounds pleasant. Hmm. Demon oil. I wonder what kind of spells I could use that in. Alright, “holy water”, yeah, of course. “But failing that, the blood of an angel”? Well that's a tall order. And the other one says, blah blah blah, “anointed with blood from a guardian of life and death”. Yes, please be a little bit more cryptic. They couldn't really mean an angel, right? Maybe... a reaper?'  
  
_ Though Hanna thought he was sort of getting the gist of what these books were jointly implying in very different ways, he was pretty sure he was never going to be able to remember it all. The front desk had a cup full of pens sitting on it, and a printer sitting behind it, so with a quick glance to make sure nobody was waiting to mess with his books, Hanna went to beg some paper and a writing utensil from the clerk. She gave him a few sheets begrudgingly ('I'm too nice to say no, but bring your own next time,' her look said) and didn't stop him when he grabbed a pen, and he was heading back to his table when he smelled... barbeque?  
  
Barbeque was really a distracting thing to smell in a library, so he stopped and sniffed the air for a moment, wondering where the hell it was coming from. He noticed the smoke rising in the back corner just before an alarm began to blare and the overhead sprinklers came to life and started showering water down upon the unsuspecting heads of the library's attendees. There was startled screaming all around him, not because water was especially scary but because why was it raining in the library?! The sudden hectic rush of would-be readers toward the front of the building made Hanna disoriented for a minute, and he stumbled along with them before he froze, remembering that he had a reason to think water _was_ especially scary, and the (presumable) fire that caused the rain even more so.  
  
“Shivaji!” Hanna called, loud enough to be heard over the falling water and the yelling and the screeching alarm, but only just. He remembered that he hadn't yet used that name aloud and switched to “Winfield?!” as he ran down the aisles, but he neither saw nor heard the zombie before he was forcibly ushered out into the crowded parking lot by the frantic staff.  
  
He stood surrounded by a variety of other wet people, and they all stared at the front doors of the building like they couldn't quite believe what had just happened. In the distance, fire-engine sirens blared as they rushed to the scene to put out the probably-already-extinguished fire. When a few tense seconds passed and the compulsion to stare at the on-going mini-disaster was gone, Hanna turned and pushed through the crowd in hopes of finding his friend. They found each other near the edge of the crowd and collectively heaved one sigh of relief.  
  
“Oh man, I was so worried,” Hanna puffed, still a little breathless from the whole ordeal. He grabbed the zombie's upper arms and held on tight to the damp fabric. “Fire _and_ water?! That is like the worst possible situation for you to be in. God, you're soaked. Here, let me...”  
  
Hanna hastily removed his over-shirt and turned it inside out, using the un-soaked parts as a towel to pat Shivaji's skin dry.  
  
The zombie moved as if to stop Hanna, but seemed to decide to let him continue. “Are _you_ okay?” he asked, far more concerned than he needed to be.  
  
“ _I'm_ fine,” Hanna said, laughing. “I can _get_ wet. _You_ , on the other hand... We should really get you home so you can get out of those soggy clothes.”  
  
“What about your research?”  
  
“Research? Oh, shit.” In the haste to find Shivaji, Hanna had entirely forgotten the purpose of his droning hours of study. “God, I left them open. Those pages are probably ruined! Augh, damn it.” He could just imagine the ink running in the oldest of the books, blurring together and leaving faint impressions on the neighboring pages. Even in the newer books, printed in water-safe(r) ink, there was little chance of unsticking the pages without them tearing. The fire engines were there now, and it didn't seem anyone was going to be allowed to go back in anytime soon, and even if they did, there was probably nothing Hanna could do to salvage his research and he knew it. And honestly, if he had to choose between them, the zombie's well-being was by far his higher priority. “Well... Whatever. It doesn't matter,” he said with a heavy sigh. “It was just information. I'm sure I can find it again, someday, if I have to.”  
  
Shivaji took the shirt from Hanna's hands; his arms had fallen limp to his sides as he'd realized what he'd lost. “I'm sorry, Hanna,” he said. He found a dry section of the shirt and rubbed it over Hanna's hair, fluffing the curls back to life.  
  
Hanna huffed out a short laugh and lowered his head a fraction. “Nah, it's fine. Thanks. Let's go home. I'll worry about all that later.”  
  
True to his original plan, they went left out from the library (swinging wide to stay out of the way of the firemen, and taking their time because Shivaji seemed to find them mildly fascinating) and cut through the Middlebrook subdivision until they were far enough from the police station to jump back on the main road. (Maybe it wouldn't have mattered if his zombie friend were to notice the officers, but Hanna already felt exhausted and damn it he really didn't need any more drama to deal with today so it was better not to risk it.)  
  
They were home in little time, and Hanna was immensely glad as they climbed the stairs that Mrs. Blaney was not out harassing tenants yet. (She usually waited around on the first floor in front of the office around the time that everyone was coming home from their nine-to-five jobs to remind the truant sorts that rent was fast approaching, or to strike up conversation with people who paid on time. Neither was a desirable situation.) To his surprise, however, there _was_ a woman waiting for them in front of their door.  
  
“Mr. Cross!” Toni called as she saw their heads crest above the stair rails. She stood from where she'd been sitting against the wall and slid her phone back into her pocket. “I mean, Hanna. And, er, Raimundo.”  
  
“Winfield,” the zombie said, looking to Hanna for approval.  
  
“Shivaji,” Hanna supplied. He raised a hand in greeting to the were-girl. “What's up? Everything okay? Your brother didn't go missing again, did he?”  
  
“Huh? Oh, no, no, he's fine.” She smiled in a sort of embarrassment, though Hanna had no idea what she had to be embarrassed about; compared to all the people he knew, she ranked _at least_ above average in 'having your shit together'. “No, I just... wanted to check on you. You two.”  
  
“Oh, thanks,” Hanna said, feeling a little awkward but pleased because had he ever had someone just drop by to see if he was doing okay? Aside from, you know, back in the day. “Yeah, um, we're good. I mean, actually we need to get inside so he can change--” Hanna jerked a thumb in the zombie's direction. “--but you can come in.”  
  
Toni seemed a little nervous but she nodded and followed them in. “Okay, thanks.”  
  
Hanna wasted no time in divesting Shivaji of his damp orange dress shirt. He threw it to the ground haphazardly, then felt kind of bad for treating someone else's clothes like that but didn't spare the energy to pick it back up. He stood and stared at the zombie's pants after the shirt was gone, and the zombie stared at him staring.  
  
“I think my pants are mostly dry,” he said, though Hanna sort of got the impression that if he tried to continue undressing his friend, he wouldn't stop him.  
  
“Ah, yeah, that's probably fine.” Hanna backed off slightly. “I mean, I don't have any spare pants that would fit you anyway, but, um, let me go get you a shirt.” He trotted off to his bedroom and rummaged around in the bottom of his dresser for the largest, cleanest shirt he could find which, luckily, ended up being a plain black t-shirt. (That was a pleasant surprise, because most of his shirts tended to be brightly colored or patterned, and yeah, _he_ liked them, but they'd probably just look silly on his friend.) He brought it out and handed it to Shivaji, who put it on with only slightly more effort than one would normally put into donning a t-shirt. (Hanna thought it was pretty smooth for someone who'd never worn a tee before. He also thought it looked pretty good on him, if a little surreal. But hey, surreal was his life these days.)  
  
(Meanwhile, Toni did her best not to stare at either the front or back of the half-clothed zombie. She failed, but not conspicuously.)  
  
“So what's going on?” Hanna asked, now that the imminent danger of increased zombie skin deterioration was gone. “Do you need something?”  
  
“Mm, no, not really,” Toni said, sounding not quite sure of herself and looking a bit small. “I really did just want to make sure you were doing okay.”  
  
Hanna laughed, but then stopped because he didn't want her to think he was laughing at her. “Well, we did just have to evacuate the library because of a fire.”  
  
Toni's mouth fell open. “Oh my god, really? Are you alright?” She looked at Shivaji, checking him over (differently from before), like she was checking for scorch marks or other such damage. Hanna appreciated her apparent zombie-welfare knowledge (or maybe it was just common sense).  
  
“We're fine,” Shivaji told her, almost smiling. “Just a little wet.”  
  
“Which can be equally dangerous!” Hanna informed them, because people tended to forget that such a benign element could be such a horror. So he didn't sound totally deranged, he added, “--in the long term.”  
  
“Right,” Toni said with a nod. “But you're both okay?”  
  
Standing around was awkward, so Hanna took a seat on the couch arm opposite from where the zombie already had. “Yeah, we're good. Er, why? I mean, did you have some reason to think we wouldn't be? Are _you_ okay?”  
  
Toni did look distinctly embarrassed then. “Yeah, I've just... mm, I've just felt a little nervous today. Maybe not nervous. On edge? It's probably just because of the blood moon.”  
  
“Blood moon?” Shivaji asked, tilting his head. He probably would have looked out the window at the moon if the only window in the whole place wasn't the tiny useless thing in Hanna's bedroom, and if it wasn't still fairly bright out.  
  
“Sorry, it's just a fancy name for a full moon eclipse,” she explained, combing fingers back through her blue mohawk. “Regular full moons are hard enough for werewolves. You know. Add an eclipse on top of that and... that's probably why I'm feeling jittery.”  
  
Hanna did a quick mental tally of the ingredients he had in his cupboards currently. “I bet I could make you something,” he told her. “A tonic or something like that.”  
  
She looked relieved at just the idea of it. “Could you?” she asked, hopeful. “Only if it's not too much trouble. I know I already owe you a lot.”  
  
With a shrug, Hanna nodded. “I was never that great at tonics, but I could totally try.” He hopped off the couch arm and went to rummage through the cabinets. He could hear Toni and Shivaji talking as he sorted though plastic baggies and mismatched tupperware containers.  
  
“So you don't remember your own name?” he heard Toni ask, once he pulled his head out of the depths of the cupboard.  
  
A short silence followed, like the zombie was thinking or shaking his head. “No, I don't remember anything from before the past week.”  
  
“God, that's so recent. I thought you were friends with Hanna.”  
  
“We _are_ friends,” the zombie said, and maybe Hanna was just getting his hopes up, but he swore he could hear a smile in his voice.  
  
“Ah,” Toni said, like that explained everything. “I guess it's just like that for some people.”  
  
Shivaji made a quiet humming noise. “I suppose so.” He had nothing to say after that, but the silence seemed full.  
  
Well, this tonic was probably not his best work, but Hanna was pretty sure it would at least be better than anything you could get at a convenience store or pharmacy, unless the pharmaceutical world had started catering to werewolves while he wasn't looking. He poured enough of the powder mix for two edgy werewolves into a little baggy and brought it out to his guest. (The not-undead one. Was Shivaji even a guest anymore? Hanna rather preferred.... maybe roommate.)  
  
“Here,” he said, handing it off to Toni. “Just mix a tablespoon of it with some hot water. Or if you've got like a tea strainer that might be good, otherwise it'll probably be kinda gritty.”  
  
“Thanks.” She tucked the ziploc into her bag and fixed a long loose strand of hair behind her ear. “Really. I feel kind of bad that you're always helping me out like this and I still haven't paid you.”  
  
Hanna waved a hand at her. “Don't thank me too much. It's been like seventy years since I've made that one. It might make you smell like a swamp or something,” he joked. (He _half_ -joked.)  
  
Not unexpectedly, Toni looked a little alarmed (though Hanna didn't realize until later that it was more about the seventy years remark than the joke). Still, she smiled and thanked him again and then said her goodbyes.  
  
“We still need to get together for dinner some time,” she mentioned once she was in the hallway. “Maybe next week?”  
  
“Sure,” Hanna called, waving after her. He casually realized that they had no way of getting a hold of one another except for visiting each other's houses unannounced, since Hanna still didn't have a phone (it was steadily making its way up his to-do list), but he shrugged it off. Clearly, she knew where he lived.  
  
Inside, Shivaji was once again perched in his spot and tapping away at the laptop; he'd gotten pretty good at it in the past two days. Hanna didn't doubt that the zombie would soon surpass him in typing talent.  
  
“Anything interesting going on?” he asked, coming to stand behind him, but trying not to seem like one of those obnoxious people who read over peoples' shoulders.  
  
Shivaji closed the lid of the laptop and turned towards Hanna with an attentive look. “Only decades of history. Nothing worth mention,” he said with a little huff of laughter.  
  
Hanna nudged his shoulder up against his friend's. “Oh, of course not.”  
  
“What should we do now?” the zombie asked, as ready as ever to snap back into work-mode. “Should we go back and try to recover your research?”  
  
Actually recovering anything seemed unlikely, about which Hanna had become resigned almost immediately following the evacuation. No, any use he was going to get out of those books, he had already gotten. He didn't have an eidetic memory by far, so he'd have to deal with whatever he managed to remember from the few pages he'd actively read. But mostly, after such a spectacular failure, he wanted to forget it all, at least for a while. “No,” he said, drawing the syllable out as he thought. “I don't think we should bother. Not now, anyway. I was kinda thinking about just... hanging out for a while?” He looked to the zombie somewhat reluctantly, unsure if the man was going to be offended by Hanna's sudden lack of interest in continuing their research, particularly as it mostly pertained to _him._  
  
Surprisingly, Shivaji simply nodded, as if it made perfect sense to just abandon a case because your partner felt a little stressed out. “Alright,” he said, and it wasn't even a begrudging sort of 'alright', either-- just a regular ol' honest 'alright'.  
  
“Really?” Hanna asked. “You don't mind?”  
  
Shivaji's eyebrows rose up in the middle. “Of course not.”  
  
Relief flooded through Hanna, or, well, maybe it wasn't quite a flood, and not a deluge either (although, between the two, which was supposed to be the larger?)-- it was probably more of a soft rain of relief. He just wanted to take a couple hours and be _normal._ Or normal-ish. He wanted to be something between what the two of them had been _back then_ , and what he used to pretend he was when he was sitting alone in his apartment and there were no demons (literal or metaphorical) to be dealt with. Maybe the word he was looking for was 'okay'.  
  
“Er, okay then!” he said, and he felt foolishly a little better for verbalizing the word. “So, uh, you wanna watch a movie or something?”  
  
The zombie readily agreed to watching a movie, though it was probable that he didn't _exactly_ know what was meant by that? At least not until Hanna borrowed the laptop from him, browsed through his folder of downloaded films (thank you, neighbors with unsecured wi-fi; thank you, PirateBay), selected “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and set the laptop up on a cardboard box a few feet away.  
  
Now, Monty Python was a great movie, but Hanna had seen it enough times that he wasn't really missing anything from mostly staring out of the corner of his eye at Shivaji, trying to gauge his reaction. (For the most part, he thought the reaction was a good one. Every so often, the zombie would let out this tiny almost startled laugh, like he wasn't sure why he was laughing or if it was actually supposed to be funny after all. Hanna took pity on him and consciously didn't restrain himself from quoting his favorite parts and giggling stupidly at them. After that, Shivaji's laughter was just slightly less bewildered.)  
  
If 70 percent of the movie was spent observing his roommate (and maybe ten percent actually watching the film), the remaining amount of time was taken up by idly imagining that they were just two regular friends hanging out on a regular (er, what had he decided this was? Saturday? Sunday?) afternoon, and then imagining variations of that which included different definitions of their relationship, and then imagining what it would be like to have a better couch.  
  
By the time the movie was over, Hanna had _aaaaalmost_ forgotten that things weren't perfect between them and in their life, so he put on another movie and let himself zone out for a bit longer.  
  
Wouldn't it be just... _awesome_ for everything to be right again? Or at least as right as things had ever been? He wasn't asking for his parents to be alive again or anything like that, but look, Shivaji was here now. He was _here._ It was like a dream. Or maybe the past hundred years had been a dream. Whatever the case, the way things were now... maybe they could stay like this. The only thing that stood in the way of pretty much eternal happiness was... well... No, look, no, they were sitting here together, both on this lumpy couch (when had that happened? Somehow they'd both ended up on the actual cushions) in this shitty little apartment, and things were really good. Everything was looking up. Except for Hanna; he was looking sideways, having zoned out to the point that his body apparently had a hard time keeping him upright. His head was resting on the arm of the couch. His feet were tucked against the zombie's side.  
  
He fell asleep as Godzilla was destroying Tokyo.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (There's a side-story that happens during this chapter, if you're interested in it. http://archiveofourown.org/works/5459618/chapters/14691343 )


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This "chapter" got super long, so I split it into two, just FYI.

A strong gust of wind blew in through the open window and sent loose papers flying around the room, but Hanna didn't bother getting up and securing them or closing the window. The fresh autumn breeze was exceptionally nice after the long, hot, stale summer, and the way it ruffled his hair was welcome, so it could blow his papers about if that was what it wanted to do. He was busy anyway, carving an exaggerated face into a large pumpkin.  
  
“I'd wondered what use you had for a vegetable,” the detective said. He came in as Hanna was administering the finishing touches to his artfully decorated gourd.  
  
“What else would I do with one?” Hanna asked, although he wasn't expecting an answer, as he felt it was fairly obvious: nothing.  
  
The detective came around to stand behind Hanna so he could see the pumpkin's face. “What _are_ you doing with it, if I may ask?”  
  
Hanna hefted it up off the floor and into his lap, tilted so the carving was fully visible. “It's a Jack-o'-lantern,” he said. “It's a Hallow's Eve thing. You never carved them when you were young?”  
  
“No. We had very few rituals or traditions other than Christmas and Thanksgiving. Something like this would probably have been considered too frivolous.” He leaned down for a closer look at the pumpkin's face, which was caught somewhere between a grin and a grimace. “What is the point of it, anyway?”  
  
Standing carefully in order not to drop the fragile gourd, Hanna took it over to the bed and clambered up on it to set the Jack-o'-lantern on the wide windowsill. “It's meant to ward off spirits or the undead or guide lost souls, or something along those lines. It depends on who you ask.” He climbed back down and went to rummage through his apothecary shelves for the thickest candle he could find.  
  
“Wouldn't that rather interfere with your work?” the detective asked, half concerned and half humoring.  
  
Hanna laughed at the thought of toting the pumpkin around with him to his various jobs. “I don't plan on raising any dead in my own home,” he said. He found a tea-light candle among his collection and scratched a little spell into the bottom of it so that it would burn longer than usual, before he lit it and climbed back up to the sill to place it in the Jack-o'-lantern's hollow core. He turned around and sat down on the bed, facing the detective. “It doesn't really work anyway,” he added. “It's not magic, just an old superstition. I could _make_ it magic, if I wanted, but I wouldn't bother. I just like it as a decoration.”  
  
The detective nodded, readily accepting Hanna's explanation, except for one fundamental flaw he saw in it. “If it's meant for Hallow's Eve, you've gotten a little ahead of yourself. I know your experience with vegetables is limited, but they do tend to rot.”  
  
“I'm familiar with rot,” Hanna responded, grinning. “I carved a preservation rune into the bottom of it, of course. It won't be fresh enough to eat, but it should stay solid through the winter, at least.”  
  
“Not that its freshness is of much concern to you,” the detective joked, always ready to poke at Hanna's distaste for greenery and their ilk. He didn't stand there to wait for Hanna's rebuttal, instead making his way to the kitchenette and starting a pot of water for tea, one of the few by-products of vegetation which the necromancer _didn't_ heartily protest.  
  
Though the detective was quite capable of brewing tea on his own, Hanna stood up off the bed and went to 'help', or at least to stand close enough to nudge the detective when he countered the man's ribbing. “I actually find pumpkin not entirely disgusting,” he said, despite his previous assertion that they were good for nothing but as an artistic medium. “But I think that's because it's a fruit.”  
  
“A pumpkin is a squash. It's like a zucchini.” The detective didn't even bother to take his eyes from the tea he was measuring, but he did return Hanna's nudge.  
  
“It's a fruit!” Hanna insisted. “You don't make pies and pastries out of vegetables.”  
  
Again the detective didn't look at him, but even from his low vantage point, Hanna could see the edge of a smile curling up on his face, badly hidden. “Perhaps I'll attempt a zucchini cake,” the man said, almost laughing.  
  
Hanna _did_ laugh, heedless of appearing reserved in front of the detective any longer. Actually, as time passed, he found he was making a conscious effort not to hold back on his thoughts and feelings where the other man was concerned. It was still a work in progress, that sort of openness, but it _was_ progress.  
  
Though as of yet, Hanna had not been able to bring himself to say the thing he most wanted to say, in any of the various ways he might possibly express it, so that was what weighed on his mind most often when they were together.  
  
They sat at the table, drinking hot cups of tea, a feat that would have been unthinkable only a few muggy weeks ago. The detective was going over some paperwork he'd brought with him, and Hanna was scribbling in one of his notebooks, editing a spell he'd been tinkering with lately. But he couldn't focus well; the scent of the fall air wafting in through the window was distracting him, pulling his thoughts from the mundane (if one could call spell work such a thing) to the fantastical (though imagining relationships was not usually termed fantasy in the minds of most, was it?).  
  
His imaginings certainly _seemed_ like fantasy, compared to the reality he knew. Ghosts and ghouls were real, if sometimes not entirely tangible, and magic surrounded him like air, and monsters most people could hardly fathom were undeniably existent, even if he wished they weren't. He wasn't complaining; this was simply what life was, and he felt he handled it all fairly well. But for other people, monsters were fiction and marriage was fact, though maybe he was getting a bit ahead of himself with a statement like that.  
  
He looked at the detective and didn't really try to pretend he wasn't. He probably smiled, because the detective looked up and smiled back for a short moment before returning to his work.  
  
The simple fact of the matter was that if Hanna asked the detective to move in with him, he was fairly certain the man would say yes. But that was one of the few things truly simple about the situation, other than the fact that Hanna _wanted_ him there, and that he was quite sure that _he_ wanted to _be_ there. Getting thrown in jail for sodomy when some idiot inevitably felt like picking an unfair fight with one of them was not simple and not something either one of them wanted. Potentially getting hanged for witchcraft was even less appealing. If Hanna were accused of sorcery, the detective would probably only be fired for fraternizing with him, but it would still be a rather unfortunate turn of events. Those were real threats to their well-being even now, but if they lived together the chance of someone targeting them would probably more than double. Hanna cursed himself for being so high-profile.  
  
But despite all that, he still wanted it, their... togetherness. He wasn't sure how to verbalize it exactly, but Hanna just wanted to _be with_ the detective, every day, every night, every place that either of them went (except for the police station; Hanna was happy to avoid the place). They already spent a great deal of their time around one another, but there were still gaps between them that weren't at all necessary, which could be easily rectified by the detective moving in with him. (It wasn't logical for it to be the other way around, because the detective's living space was, quite frankly, a piece of shit.) There was more than enough room for the both of them in Hanna's apartment, as evidenced by the fact that the detective already wasted away most of his free time _there_ , and not in his own home, and if they did not need to worry about having separate beds... Well, again, Hanna had to remind himself not to get _too_ caught up in his fantasies, however much he might like to.  
  
He wasn't sure it was fair to call them 'fantasies', as they weren't fantastical in the way that stories of mythological creatures were, nor in the way that dreams of becoming rich were. Those were fantasies because they were impossible, or so improbable as makes no difference. They were dreams beyond the scope of the dreamer's capabilities. Hanna could, in all likelihood, make his fantasies reality in a few short moments, were he so inclined. After all, it was nothing he was incapable of doing, and he even thought the detective would be fairly receptive to his suggestions. But a reality you must live in a tiny bubble is hardly a reality at all, and a grand part of his fantasy was _not being arrested for it,_ or at least not having it hung over either of their heads in blackmail.  
  
Well. Perhaps today was not the day to make an attempt at fulfilling this particular dream. There was still this spell to finish fixing, and the detective's foot under the table that he could nudge with his own, a sort of very small, silent promise that he would fully address this fantasy at some point, even if the detective had no way of knowing that was what it meant. Then again, the detective's hand did wander the little empty space between them on the table and give Hanna's own a quick touch of greeting before retreating back, so it seemed likely he understood well enough.  
  
xXxXx  
  
“What's your opinion of the situation?”  
  
“My opinion? My opinion is that you spend far too much time discussing personal matters when you ought to be working.”  
  
Ples Tibenoch stood a few feet away from where Hanna knelt, though he gave the impression of almost floating despite how firmly his feet were on the ground. Perhaps it was his impatience that made him seem less chained to the earth, as everything else about him appeared human.  
  
“I'm capable of multitasking!” Hanna assured the reaper.  
  
Ples barely restrained an eye roll. “Apparently not well. You've miss-drawn at least two of your accursed symbols. There. And that one.”  
  
Hanna hummed appreciatively and fixed the erroneous characters. “For all that you claim to hate necromancy, you're surprisingly good at remembering runes you've only seen a few times.”  
  
“That has nothing to do with my preference of any magic over another, and everything to do with it being my job to remember such details. Some of us take our professions seriously.”  
  
_Too_ seriously, was Hanna's opinion, though he appreciated Ples showing up to help him with this. Of course, if it was not Ples, it would have been another reaper, and it would have made little to no difference to his job, but Hanna _did_ have preferences, even if the reaper claimed not to.  
  
As if sensing that someone was having friendly thoughts about him, Ples sneered (though it was not a malicious sneer, Hanna thought) and said, “Tell me you pester the others with inane chitter-chatter as well.”  
  
“Sorry,” Hanna replied with the tiniest of shrugs, quite lacking in apology. “It's just you. The other reapers don't stick around long enough to say more than 'greetings', if they bother with that much.”  
  
It was clear from the look on his face (Hanna couldn't see it now, as he was working ardently on finishing his spell, but he'd seen it before) that Ples was regretting his own hard-working nature. “Yes, well, they may trust you to do what you like with these wayward souls, but it is a reaper's responsibility to ensure a soul is taken proper care of.”  
  
He'd heard the spiel before, so Hanna gave only a quiet, “Uh-huh,” and smiled that the stolid spirit was so predictable. He supposed it was a side-effect of immortality, though perhaps the man had been that way even when he was human, if human he ever had been.  
  
Admittedly, Ples was right that he ought to focus on the job, so he abstained from bothering the reaper for a few minutes and finished the spell-circle. He said the incantation to summon and trap the stray soul his client complained had been haunting the house, and as soon as it swirled into being within the circle, the reaper manipulated it into a little glowing ball of mist and plucked it out of the air, vanishing it like a juggler's orb.  
  
“Thanks for the help,” Hanna said, standing and dusting off his knees and hands.  
  
The reaper shook his head. “It is my duty,” he said, though it did sound a bit like 'you're welcome' to Hanna's ears. Though most reapers would have been long gone by now, Ples gave Hanna a long look as the necromancer cleaned up his spell debris. “I think you ought to do whatever will most benefit the two of you in the long term.”  
  
Hanna didn't let himself look surprised that Ples was acquiescing to finally give him advice on the situation. Honestly, he wasn't that shocked; that tiny thread of sociability was why Hanna liked him compared to all the others of his kind. “It's not that easy,” Hanna responded, not missing a beat. “Being together would benefit us, but going to prison would do the opposite of that. Even just the stigma would be harmful to our reputations.”  
  
Ples looked unimpressed, though that was not much of a deviation from his usual expression. “The laws you mortals choose to waste your time on make very little sense to me.”  
  
Hanna grunted in agreement.  
  
The reaper was too wise to suggest that Hanna ignore any laws he didn't like, or perhaps familiar enough with the necromancer's style to know that he already tended to do that, at least until they came for their dues. “I must admit I am surprised that stigma would be a concern to you.”  
  
“It's not really,” Hanna said. “I mean, not for me. People who are being haunted don't really have the luxury of caring what goes on in my personal life. It's why I still have a job. But the detective could get fired if one of his bosses wakes up on the wrong side of the bed. And he needs to eat every day, so not having a job would be bad for his health.”  
  
Ples thought on Hanna's response for an unusually heavy second. “It seems you're saying that nothing you do could have any further effect on your job, and nothing you do could guarantee your partner's continued employment. If that is the case, then you have no control over those matters and you should do what you like.”  
  
Hanna frowned, his mouth open slightly. “Uh... I don't think that's exactly how it works... but you might be right anyway. Maybe life is too short not to act on opportunities like this.”  
  
The reaper raised a crooked eyebrow. “I can't say I share the sentiment. Nonetheless, I am glad you've come to a decision. Now, I must be going. I've other lost souls to attend to.”  
  
And with no further ado, he was gone, leaving Hanna's thoughts a bit clearer but his mind a bit foggy, the usual aftereffect of talking with a creature who defied space and time. He was the slightest bit jealous that Ples wasn't bound to mortal rules and social norms, but as he thought on the subject he realized that perhaps he didn't have to be either.  
  
xXxXx  
  
It had been several weeks since Hanna had spoken to Ples, but despite whatever conclusion the reaper thought Hanna had come to, he hadn't managed to bring it up to the detective. The both of them had been far busier than normal as autumn fully came into its own and apparently inspired people toward all sorts of action, not the least of which were a series of murders that kept them both busy. They worked together on a few cases that month, but for the most part their days were spent handling jobs on their own.  
  
A span of at least a week and a half went by during which Hanna didn't see the detective at all, but the man must have dropped by at some point when he was out, because two or three of the days he came home to lukewarm meals and little notes of, 'sorry I missed you' and 'make sure you eat' that made his chest a little tight.  
  
The sudden rush of activity came to a head and then calmed down just after Hallow's Eve, and they were finally able to spend several quiet evenings in a row catching up on the goings-on of each other's daily lives.  
  
“You would not believe how many people have wanted to contact dead relatives these past few weeks,” Hanna said as he slathered butter on a toasted piece of french bread and dipped it into his stew. “Something about the fall season seems to make people want to tie up loose ends. I can't complain too much because it's a pretty expensive job, but all this blood-letting is tiring me out.” He said it with a lopsided grin because, honestly, he was accustomed enough after some eight years of it that it didn't bother him that much, but the detective still looked concerned.  
  
“Do you think perhaps you ought to leave off with it then?”  
  
Hanna waved the idea away with his half-eaten bread slice. “Last time I summoned a spirit without paying the blood price, it barely agreed to speak to me at all. I'm surprised I got the client to pay me, actually. I don't have an especially good record with resurrections when I don't give them a little.”  
  
“I don't think that's any fault of yours,” the detective said, looking and sounding very much like he was restraining what he really wanted to say.  
  
“Maybe not,” Hanna said with a shrug. “But clients certainly think so.”  
  
And that was all that either of them had to say on the matter for the evening, Hanna happily going back to his dinner, the detective returning to his somewhat less enthusiastically.  
  
A few days later found the detective letting himself into an empty apartment (cats notwithstanding) and focusing on cooking until the home's true owner returned. He had already made two extra side dishes, eaten his portion, and cleaned up most of the mess by the time Hanna stumbled in looking like death's third-day leftovers.  
  
“Welcome back,” he said, mostly glad to see Hanna, and only a little bothered by his lateness; after all, they had not made concrete plans to meet tonight, only generic statements about liking to see each other.  
  
Hanna sighed wearily, shutting the door behind him and collapsing into the nearest chair. “Good to _be_ back. Ugh, after a night like this, I don't want to leave for another week.”  
  
“Are you alright?” the detective asked. He pulled a second chair up to the table and sat as near to Hanna as he could without crowding him. “You look--” The word he was looking for was likely 'terrible', but he chose to be a little more tactful than his friend would have. “--a bit worse for the wear.”  
  
“No, no, I'm fine,” Hanna assured him. “Just dealing with picky clients and unhelpful corpses. You know how it is. It's essentially the same as what you have to work with.”  
  
“Mm,” the detective hummed, still looking close at the darkness under Hanna's eyes and the way the color of his hair seemed a little duller. It had used to be vibrant red, he was sure. He opened his mouth, wanting to speak, and then closed it again, wanting not to offend Hanna, and then opened it again because his conscience was speaking up loudly from the back of his head where he often let it rest where the necromancer was concerned. “Yes, but I don't have to spill my blood to get my suspects to cooperate with me.”  
  
Hanna made a silly dismissive sound, an amused puff of air. “I didn't even have to give blood tonight. Corpses are far easier to work with than spirits. This one was just being a pain. It's nothing you need to worry about.”  
  
The detective was not reassured by Hanna's nonchalance. “If I don't worry about it, will you?” he asked, quite sure he knew that Hanna would _say_ that he would be careful and watch out for himself, and then most certainly _not_ do so. He didn't leave space for an answer. “It isn't just the blood. It's the magic. It can't be good for you.”  
  
Somewhat annoyed but largely endeared to the way the detective worried over him, Hanna shook his head. “I feel alright,” he said. “I promise! It's just been a rough month. You can't say you aren't a little worn out too.”  
  
It was true, undoubtedly, and the detective sighed. But it wasn't only work that stressed him, especially as he became more aware of the darkness that seemed to be growing on Hanna like a second shadow. Still, the necromancer wasn't going to listen to him, so he stood and made a plate of warm food for him, figuring it was the best he could do for now.  
  
The heavy concern over Hanna's health subsided a little, as it almost always did when the detective either saw him every day or went for a long time without seeing him. It only returned after another hard week of work when they found the time to cooperate on a case involving a theft and a murder. When the detective came to Hanna's door, knocked once and let himself in, as was usual, he was almost surprised to see him there, since the necromancer had been utilizing the recent fair weather to take long trips to restock his rarer ingredients. He seemed to be done with the collecting and was now working on the arduous task of organizing.  
  
“Morning,” the detective said, coming over to stand beside him at the table.  
  
“Morning,” Hanna responded, distracted, as he poured things in and out of jars.  
  
The movement of different-colored powders and herbs and stones was a little mesmerizing and the detective watched as he presented his offer. “I've a case I thought you might help me with,” he said. “There's been a robbery at an uptown home. The thief killed a maid before he escaped.”  
  
Hanna pushed the jars away and turned to the detective. “And you think she could give us a description. Good idea. Give me a minute and we can go.”  
  
Although that was exactly the reason the detective had come, he was suddenly unsure when he saw Hanna's face, the way his eyes seemed almost sunken and the edges of his mouth were drawn. “You look ill,” he said, not bothering to be delicate. “Are you sure you're feeling well enough?”  
  
“Huh? I feel fine.” Hanna frowned as if he had no notion of the detective's meaning.  
  
The detective was not convinced. “When was the last time you slept?”  
  
Hanna thought for a moment, taking far longer than most would with answering such a simple question. “Three or four days ago, I think.” He looked up at his partner's face and hurriedly amended, “But that's normal for me. Look, I'll sleep tonight, but I'm not tired now. Let's go find that thief. The farther away we let him get, the longer it will take tracking him down.”  
  
Indeed, the detective agreed that solving their case was first priority, and he led the way out. But hearing Hanna say that sleeping only twice per week was normal, even though he'd been aware of it for at least the past year or two, was shocking to him and made him want quite badly to reassess what his priorities _ought_ to be.  
  
The household of the crime scene was still rather shaken, and its members took easily to the suggestion that the detectives needed to work undisturbed, so they agreed to stay clear of the home for the day. A second maid, doing her best not to show her trembling, guided them to the room where they'd laid the slain servant and then hurriedly excused herself.  
  
“Poor girl,” the detective said, coming to her side. She looked peaceful in her death, even though she'd been slashed right across the throat, which had to have been painful. He took a simple ring from her finger and held onto it as Hanna laid the circle and said the incantation.  
  
She woke a bit slowly, as if tired, and struggled to pull herself up to a sitting position on the hard tile floor. Hanna came up from behind to help, but she didn't pay him much attention, focusing mostly on the one standing before her who held her ring, though she didn't know it.  
  
“Are you... you're not new servants, are you? Oh goodness, I must have... fallen asleep here? Please don't tell the mistress. I can't afford to lose this job yet!”  
  
“We're not servants,” the detective told her. “We're here investigating a theft that happened this morning. We thought you might have gotten a look at the perpetrator.”  
  
The maid appeared shocked for a moment at the thought of a theft taking place there, and then she began to look distinctly nervous. “Ahh... no, I didn't see him. I mean, I haven't seen anyone.”  
  
A quick glance between the two 'detectives' proved they both had the feeling that the girl was lying. Hanna nodded to the detective (the official one) to question her, so he cleared his throat.  
  
“So you didn't see the man who attacked you?” he asked, gesturing vaguely to his own neck.  
  
The girl looked confused and reached a hand up to her neck, surprised when she brought it back bloody. She narrowed her eyes a minute, not at the detective, he didn't think, but in lazy concentration. “I... He really did that, didn't he? I'm not having a bad dream...”  
  
Her tone of voice made her sound both resigned and affronted, a curious mixture of emotions to feel about a random attack, the detective thought.  
  
“Did you know the man?” he asked. When she hesitated, he did his best to sound properly sympathetic to her plight. “I understand you want not to appear complicit in his crime, but our only goal is to retrieve the stolen goods and bring him to justice for his attack on you. You needn't fear retribution now from your employer or from the law.” He felt the slightest bit guilty about his phrasing of the last sentence, a sort of round-about half-true way of speaking that he actually had _not_ picked up from Hanna, despite the necromancer's assumption, but had probably polished because of him. It was an effective sort of thing to say, though.  
  
Grimacing, the maid decided to admit what she knew. “He was, er... my fiance.”  
  
That wasn't a turn of events that either Hanna or the detective had expected. “Well that doesn't bode well for your relationship,” Hanna said.  
  
The girl only glanced at him before returning her attention again to the detective and continuing her explanation. “You promise you won't tell the mistress?” She waited for the detective's nod before going on. “We had planned to steal a few things from here, just a few things, and they're so rich they would hardly notice! And then we were going to run off and get married. I told him to come when nobody was here, and we gathered some jewels from the mistress's room, but then...”  
  
Personally, the detective did not think that thievery was a very promising basis upon which to build a marriage, but he supposed he couldn't blame people for wanting a better life. It seemed, however, that the girl's dreams had not aligned with her fiance's after all. “Then he decided that he would rather spend the money on his own?” he suggested.  
  
“I... don't know,” she said quietly, her eyes cast down. “I would like to think he had some reason, but now I think he must simply have been a crook!”  
  
“However would you have guessed?” Hanna muttered, taking full advantage of the fact that the young woman didn't care a bit about anything he did or said.  
  
The detective ignored Hanna's remark, although he felt rather similarly about the matter. He said to the girl, “I'm sorry. But the best we can do now is to find your fiance and set this situation as right as possible. Can you tell us where we might locate him?”  
  
“There are several places he may have gone,” she said, thankfully cooperative and clear-headed for a corpse, perhaps because of the strength of the betrayal she felt. She listed off a few addresses in the city; his apartment, her apartment, a mutual friend's house. “But if he is running from the law, I don't know that he would go to any of those places.”  
  
“Hm.” The detective thought she was most likely right about that. If this man was shrewd enough to slay his fiance over a few jewels, he was probably clever enough to find a better hiding spot. “We'll have to check them and hope for the best, I suppose. Thank you for your help.”  
  
The maid blinked heavily as an alternative to a nod. “I can't believe I trusted him. You know... there is one more place he may have gone.”  
  
“Oh?”  
  
“Er, yes.” She looked a little embarrassed, but went on. “A few months back, he was acting strangely so I thought he might have another girl. I followed behind him to... well, I'm not sure what it was. It wasn't a brothel and I saw no women there, so I put it from my mind.”  
  
Hanna caught the detective's eye. “Maybe his loot cache? This might not have been his first robbery. Girl, where was this place?”  
  
Though it was Hanna who asked, she directed her response to the detective. “I... don't think I could explain. I might only recognize it by sight.”  
  
The detective sighed softly. “That is troublesome.”  
  
“It isn't too bad,” Hanna said with a shrug. “We could have her lead us there. I'll re-do the spell, add mobility and increase clarity. She's fairly fresh; if we put a scarf on her, nobody will know anything is wrong.”  
  
It was a good idea, and perhaps surprisingly likely to work, so the detective gave the go-ahead and watched as Hanna set to it. He only questioned Hanna when he went to remove the girl's shoe. He raised an eyebrow and cleared his throat, but didn't know how to ask exactly what in the world Hanna was planning on doing.  
  
“If she's going to go with us, I need to put the circle _on_ her,” he explained. He took the shoe off and then ripped the stocking so that the sole of the foot showed, to no protest from the girl, who still seemed mostly intent on the detective. He left her foot for a minute as he rummaged through his pockets and came back with a pen, a small vial of ink, and a knife. The detective understood that Hanna planned to draw the circle on the bottom of the girl's foot, somewhere that nobody would see, and that was expected, but he instinctively reached out to physically stop him when he took the knife to his palm.  
  
“Wait.” Where in the past, he might have drawn back, the detective now held firmly on to Hanna's hand, drawing it away from the blade. “Is this really necessary?”  
  
Hanna pulled at the detective's grasp, but only weakly. “She hardly acknowledges my presence as it is. If I don't give a little blood, I can't guarantee the spell will work. Making a corpse mobile takes a strong connection.”  
  
“Then...” The detective hated this blood magic, hated the need for it even when he saw that it really was needed, but he hated it most when Hanna used it at _his_ suggestion, for one of his cases. He wished there was an easy alternative, but there was only one other thing he could think of. He adjusted their hands so that _Hanna_ was holding _his._ “Then can you use mine?”  
  
It wasn't cruelly, but Hanna gave a short laugh and dropped the detective's hand. “I doubt that will work. The connection has to be with the spell-caster.” He didn't wait another moment for the detective's permission before he cut open his palm with the sharp tip of his blade, and dropped a few large beads of blood into the ink vial. Then he wasted no time painting the new circle and saying the incantation. He brushed away the old circle from around the girl and then slipped her shoe back on when he was satisfied that she was properly resurrected.  
  
Suddenly the girl seemed much more alive, though the detective was aware that she was still living on borrowed time, and that that borrowed time was Hanna's. Her gaze was a bit less confused and sleepy, and she no longer seemed inclined to treat Hanna as if he was invisible, regarding him curiously, as if she hadn't noticed before that he was worthy of her interest.  
  
“Now the only problem is the--” Hanna gestured towards the blood-stained upper half of the maid, which was unnecessary even in its vagueness.  
  
The maid was still just a little distressed about the wound (and the detective wasn't entirely sure if she didn't understand what exactly that sort of injury implied, or if she was simply taking it better than most), but she said, “I have a scarf and a coat upstairs,” and started off to go find them. She had a little difficulty with the long flight of steps, but managed in perhaps only twice the amount of time an able-bodied living person might. Even so, the two men followed along after her, just to ensure that nothing went awry on the way up or the journey back down.  
  
“What do you remember about this place?” the detective asked as they followed her out the back door and into the alley behind the fancy house.  
  
“Only that it was in the east part of the city,” she said, “around the industrial district. I rarely have cause to go there.”  
  
So they started off in that direction, originally following behind the girl, but eventually taking her by one arm each when she seemed a bit tired. They probably looked like a strange trio of lovers, and stranger still for strolling around the industrial district in the middle of the work-day. Beside that, anyone who recognized the two men would be more than a little confused as to why there was a woman directly between them, but the case had to be solved and it would do nobody any good for their lead to collapse under the weight and stress of no longer technically being alive.  
  
It was not a long walk, even with the maid's determinedly slow gait, but neither was it a straightforward one. As she had warned them, she only had the barest idea of how to get to where she meant to lead them, and only knew which path to take once the road was in front of her. Neither the detective nor Hanna was very optimistic that they were going the right way, though neither would either of them mention it to the girl; she was doing the best that she could, and doubting her judgment would not help.  
  
Before too long, however, she perked up, recognizing the cluster of warehouses they'd wandered into. “Yes, it's just this way,” she told them, pulling ahead of them with a sudden burst of energy.  
  
“Hold on a moment,” the detective said, catching her by the shoulder. “Do you think he might be armed? It's best not to run headlong into a dangerous situation.”  
  
“He may be,” she said, “but what does it matter to me now? I will go on ahead to confront him, and you may follow whenever you deem it safe.” She didn't wait for them to argue or present any better plans.  
  
Honestly, there was really no way they could deem it safe without knowing at least the first thing about the man inside, such as if he had weapons (other than the knife he must have had before) or comrades, and the building that the girl was now rushing up to had no windows along this side of it. They followed after her anyway, the detective with his pistol drawn and Hanna with some probably-experimental rune drawn on the palm of his non-injured hand. The girl pushed in through the heavy door, and they let her be vanguard, waiting several moments before they continued.  
  
She seemed annoyed that her fiance wasn't there in the antechamber of the warehouse, but chose a door and let herself through to the next room as if she was quite welcome. The detective caught the door behind her so that it didn't slam and alert whoever might be there to their presence.  
  
After turning down a few corridors, seemingly guided by a spirit of vengeance or something equally resolute, the maid found her target. The young man, perhaps around Hanna's supposed age, sat on a stack of crates and was surrounded by a small cluster of other young men, chatting and laughing and generally seeming quite unconcerned despite the fact that at least one of them had committed murder no more than six hours before. The indifference faded from the man's face when the girl came to stand before him.  
  
He laughed, like he thought he was seeing things. “Is this some kind of trick?” he asked, either to the girl, or one of his companions, or the world at large; he hadn't yet seen Hanna or the detective, who hung back in the previous hallway.  
  
“I'm wondering the same thing,” the girl replied.  
  
The man stood, the gravity of the situation finally sinking in, and he tried to back away from her without stumbling over boxes. “I don't know what is going on, if you're a twin Annette never told me about or some trick of the eyes, but you had better leave!”  
  
“Or you will do what?” Annette asked, tilting her chin at the young man in challenge.  
  
It was then that he pulled a pistol on her and, when she did not back down, fired.  
  
Annette cried out and fell to the floor, not entirely immune to pain though she was dead. The young man looked surprised for a spare moment before he dropped the gun, turned, and would have fled, were it not for the detective firing a shot of his own and hitting the murderous young thief squarely in the back of his thigh. He tumbled down and grabbed at his injured leg, choking back screams. He glanced wildly around the room, likely hoping one of his friends would come to his aid, but they had all fled or faded into the shadows.  
  
The detective rushed toward the man, keeping his gun trained on him in case he felt inclined toward committing further murder. Hanna trailed behind him, supporting Annette, who had picked herself up off the floor after the initial shock had subsided.  
  
“What...?” The girl's ex-fiance's eyes were wide, half with pain and half with shock, as the maid approached him. “I thought I killed you,” he grunted through gritted teeth.  
  
“You're as bad a murderer as you are a lover,” she said, and kicked him in the ribs with probably all the strength she could muster.  
  
Neither Hanna nor the detective stopped her, though they would have if she had not quit on her own when the young man passed out after a few more kicks.  
  
After that, the case being more-or-less solved, Hanna helped Annette back to the fancy house and released her from the spell (after thanking her thoroughly; as far as entertainment value went, this case had been quite high on the list). The detective had dragged the girl's fiance to the police station as soon as he was sure the young man wasn't going to bleed out. They agreed to meet back at Hanna's apartment as soon as they were done, so the detective finished up his paperwork as quickly as he could. Still, he was surprised to have beat Hanna there; paperwork, no matter how quickly it was dealt with, was never exactly a snappy affair, and it had been a few hours since they'd parted in the warehouse.  
  
As was usual in situations like these, the detective decided to start dinner, but a prickle of worry persisted in the back of his head, and after a short while he put his coat back on and started off toward uptown. Perhaps something had gone wrong with the dismantling of the spell, he worried. Perhaps some civilian had gotten in the way and Hanna was having a hard time excusing himself. Or maybe nothing was wrong, and the necromancer had simply gotten distracted selling deathwards or picking springnettle from a fancy uptown garden.  
  
Intuition was one of the detective's finer features (and if you were to ask Hanna or, really, anybody else, you would find that to be generally considered a tall order), and the detective knew it. He followed his instinct and it led him on a round-about path toward the expensive house, through creeping side streets where vagrants hung in shadows, the sort of streets that Hanna was most comfortable in, and which he found most profitable. The detective was shocked, but in rather an unsurprised way, to find Hanna collapsed against a brick wall down one of these dark alleys.  
  
“Hanna!” he yelled, rushing to him. Hanna did not respond, seemingly unconscious, and only roused at all when the detective knelt in front of him and held his face in both hands away from the rough brick.  
  
“Wh...?” came Hanna's unintelligible reply.  
  
“Are you alright?” the detective asked, looking around the alley again to make sure there were no suspicious figures waiting to cause trouble, or perhaps having just done so. Hanna didn't look like he'd been mugged or any such thing, which was good, but he did look ill, paler than normal by several shades, so much color washed out of him that he could practically have been a charcoal drawing.  
  
Hanna moved to sit up straighter, but didn't try to pull away from the detective's grip. He still appeared a bit confused. “I... dunno...” he said, blinking slowly and trying to take stock of his surroundings. “This... uh... isn't a real great place for a nap... is it?”  
  
“I'd say not,” the detective agreed. He was glad Hanna was conscious enough to be making dumb jokes, and perhaps conscious enough, _finally_ , of his health to be making allusions to it at such a time. “What happened?”  
  
The heap of necromancer did his best to shrug. “I was heading home, and I took the long way because someone always wants a charm down these roads--” The detective awarded himself a mental point for that one, not that he was keeping track. “--and then, uhhm, that's it.” That wasn't _it_ , the detective was sure, and he said so. Hanna cringed and admitted more. “Well I got a little dizzy and then I... suppose I fainted.”  
  
There wasn't anything the detective could say or do about that now, except for let out a heavy worried sigh, which was mostly masked by the exasperation that went along with it. “You should be home,” he said, because it was the only thing that was entirely true which he could force out of his mouth at the moment. He bent down further and scooped Hanna up by his underarms, hoisting him to his feet, but there wasn't enough energy left in Hanna's legs to hold him up, so the detective finished the job and scooped him up the rest of the way.  
  
“I'm sorry if this is a bit embarrassing,” the detective told the young man, who was quite ridiculously light.  
  
“Oh, pfft, I don't care about that,” Hanna said, though he was a little red in the face. (Infinitely preferable, the detective thought, to ghostly pale.) “The bigger concern is why I ended up like this.”  
  
The answer seemed fairly obvious to the detective, now that he'd had a moment to realize it wasn't a mugger or anything, and Hanna was clearly just deflecting by pretending it was some sort of mystery. But he really was in a pretty bad state, so the detective didn't push it. He carried him home, and nobody stopped them or gave them even a second look. Hanna dozed most of the way, still drained of all energy and desire to move on his own, but he came-to when it was time to climb the several flights of stairs up to his apartment, at least enough to cling to the detective.  
  
“Now, sleep,” the detective said, once they were inside and he'd gently laid Hanna down on the bed.  
  
“Nah, that nap just now will last me a while,” Hanna responded, though he made no noticeable effort to lift even his head from the pillow.  
  
The detective knew Hanna was just joking, at least mostly, but the way he was mistreating himself these days was a serious problem, in the detective's practically professional opinion. (As, if anyone were a professional in dealing with the stubborn redhead, it was him.) He was no longer going to sit idly by and let Hanna cause himself further harm with either blades or neglect, and if he had to supervise him literally every minute of every day, then that was what he was prepared to do.  
  
“That isn't enough to satisfy me,” he told Hanna, standing far enough back that he wasn't craning his neck directly downward to look at him, but close enough to reach out if he needed to. For the moment, he kept his short distance.  
  
Hanna laughed, a tired chuckle with a bit of an edge. “Oh, it isn't, is it?” His tone was provocative, but the detective shook his head.  
  
“Don't,” he said. “I'm serious.” As much as he liked the light back-and-forth of innuendo that they sometimes found sneaking into their conversations lately, now was not the time for it. If the detective truly cared for Hanna at all, then now was most certainly not the time for it.  
  
Hanna didn't respond. The detective was a serious man by nature, but his face now was an unusually intense mixture of pleading and commanding, and there was nothing to do but listen. Gratefully, the detective saw that his companion was keeping quiet for once, and continued on with what he knew Hanna would probably consider a lecture.  
  
“I'm concerned about you. Worried,” he amended, because concern was clinical and worry was personal, and he knew Hanna simply would not accept anything the man was about to say if it was not as personal as he could possibly make it. “Your health has been deteriorating, and please don't try to deny it. I know that you are as aware of it as I am. And I know you are aware that your habits have become unusual, the lack of eating and sleeping. Men cannot function that way.”  
  
He paused for a moment. Hanna looked like he wanted to interrupt, but didn't dare. Instead he just laid there, looking vaguely shamed.  
  
The detective went on. “I think we both know what is the cause of this. The longer it has gone on, the more clear it has become: your dark magic is ruining you. You are wasting away under its influence.” Again it seemed that Hanna wanted to perhaps protest, but that the words to do so had deserted him. The detective shook his head, softly, sadly. “I don't want to see you die for its sake. Worse yet, to become a wraith. You are already a shadow of what you were when we met, and I have come to expect that even then you had already begun to suffer.”  
  
Neither of them were sure the detective had ever before strung so many words together in so short a time. It was emotionally tiring to him, but he could not stop with yet so much to say.  
  
“I don't want you to think that I dislike the person you have become. I hope you know... that's not true. And I don't wish to dishonor your past experiences that have made you this way. But I... I have to ask you to stop.”  
  
It was very quiet for a few moments. Various evening noises filtered in from the street through the open window and under the gap from the front door and they echoed softly around the room. All the while, the two men did not break eye contact, though Hanna did seem for a minute that he was looking _through_ the detective rather than at him. After a moment that seemed long in the silence but was still shorter than the detective had expected, Hanna replied, simply, “Alright.”  
  
A weight was lifted quite suddenly from the detective's shoulders. “You mean that truly?” he asked, not because he didn't trust Hanna (he _did_ trust him; it was quite improbable how much he did), but because he wanted to hear him say it again.  
  
“Yes, I mean it,” Hanna said, quietly and probably not only because he was wracked with exhaustion. He was no longer keeping his eyes locked on the detective, instead looking off somewhere towards his own feet or maybe a threadbare section of the quilt he was laying on. His mouth was set in a sort of faint melancholy smile.  
  
The detective nodded. “Good,” he said. He swallowed some physical manifestation of worry that had shown up in his throat. There were more words he felt like he wanted to say, thanks or assurances or clarifications, but he seemed to have exhausted his supply of volunteered speech for the time being. In lieu of further discussion, he rearranged Hanna's pillows and blankets and smiled tiredly down at him, a smile that was mostly in his eyes.  
  
Hanna's eyes had drifted shut, but he spoke up to prove he was still in the waking world, if only just barely. “I don't know what you're so pleased for,” he said faintly but with some feeling. “I'm never going to be able to afford to eat again.”  
  
“We'll think of something,” the detective replied, wholly serious although Hanna's statement had been at least partly in jest. “For now, sleep.”  
  
Surprisingly, it seemed Hanna was inclined to really follow the detective's suggestion. He gave a weary sigh and fell further back into his pillow and laid there quietly while the detective tidied things around the room, but he must have heard the telltale creak of the floorboards near the door when the man went to let himself out several minutes later. “I never told you, did I?” he asked. “About why I learned necromancy in the first place.”  
  
“I don't believe so,” the detective said, pausing with his hand on the doorknob. He was a bit torn between wanting to give Hanna his full attention and wanting to enforce his decision to leave the young man to sleep, so he took his hand from the door and turned to face him, but didn't step any closer. It wasn't an especially large room anyway; they could converse well enough on opposite sides. He asked, “Will it cause you distress to part from it?”  
  
“No,” Hanna answered, like it was something of a gentle revelation. “I only really needed it that once. I think, nowdays, I can probably do without it.” He cracked open an eye and looked at the detective, just to see that he was still there.  
  
“It's for the best,” the detective told him.  
  
Hanna didn't seem quite as sure. “You really think so? You think the people I brought back weren't glad about it?”  
  
He wanted to come closer to Hanna, to be nearer when he was saying heavy things, but the detective knew he might never leave if he wasn't careful, so he stayed at the impersonal distance. “I can't claim to speak for everyone,” he said, “but I would not wish to come back when my time was over. And not with so high a cost. Perhaps those people were glad. It doesn't matter. It isn't about them. It's about the toll it takes on you. No person in the world is worth that.”  
  
“I can think of at least one,” Hanna mentioned, mostly to himself, as he curled tighter into his blankets. He didn't press the matter though. He accepted that the detective was right, at least at the heart of things.  
  
Again the detective reached for the doorknob, and he held it firmly. “Will you sleep now?”  
  
“...If you insist...” Hanna replied, voice somewhat muffled by fatigue and the covers he was burrowed into.  
  
The detective said good night and promised to return the following day, although he suspected Hanna was already too far fallen into sleep to register the words. He closed the door behind him, wondering vaguely where the cats were as he went down the several flights of stairs and out into the darkening evening.  
  
He hoped Hanna would not be bitter with him about this, or at least not too angry. Although he would have liked to have been accommodating, to have said, 'It's up to you; quit only if you want to', at this point he simply could not take no for an answer. It didn't matter how much money Hanna made with his necromancy, how useful it was in solving cases, how likely they were to starve without it (which, honestly, was not very likely; Hanna was being dramatic because he had no better response); he couldn't let it go on. He'd been acquiescent for too long, at first because he didn't fully understand, and then because it wasn't his place, but he understood now, and it had _become_ his place, and he couldn't let Hanna keep hurting himself, even if _he_ had to take all the blame for whatever happened.  
  
Maybe it would be difficult for Hanna, for both of them, to have to find other ways than what they'd relied upon for so long, but they would figure it out together. And for now, it was enough for the detective to know he wouldn't come home to find his partner nursing wounds self-inflicted for the sake of a little money.  
  
xXx

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a chapter of Rogue-Likes which occurs somewhere around this chapter-or-so. If you wanna read it, it's here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/5459618/chapters/16381786


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy was this chapter a roller-coaster. Please let me know how you feel about it, if you get the chance.   
> Ah, also: mild content warning, I guess, for a bit of "romance" and some violence, but nothing worth raising the rating over, in my opinion. (I'd call it "TV-14".)

The transition from being a necromancer to being whatever he was _sans_ the tendency to speak with the dead was not as trying as Hanna imagined it would be, though it still took an effort.   
  
Nothing specific changed about the way he lived his life, day-to-day. Most of his usual habits were similar to those of normal, magic-less people, and most of the rest of what he did was reliant on softer, neutral sorts of magics that the detective took no issue with. The only conscious decision Hanna had to make was to turn down any jobs which called for raising the dead, and that was easy enough.   
  
What was slightly more difficult was figuring out what exactly counted as necromancy. Surely not everything his mentor had taught him was to be considered black magic. But where was the line drawn? Resurrecting corpses was right out, of course, and calling spirits was to be similarly removed from his repertoire, but what of the deathward charms?   
  
“You'll know far better than I,” the detective said, when Hanna asked him some days after the initial agreement. The man wasn't concerned about the details so much as the outcome, and he was willing to admit he didn't understand the details of every piece of magic Hanna used. However, he also wasn't going to be unreasonable and demand that Hanna quit using all his spells. He trusted him to make the right choices, and as long as Hanna was no longer bloodletting for the dead, he figured they were at least heading in the right direction.   
  
So Hanna continued making the deathwards, scrying for lost or stolen items, and selling runes. He simply desisted speaking with the deceased.   
  
This did, unfortunately, have a noticeable effect on his income. Raising the dead was, by far, the most expensive service he had offered. One job was enough to keep him fed and sheltered for nearly an entire month. With that option gone, he found he had to work considerably harder to make anywhere close to the same amount of money. His other services still made him enough to pay his rent and feed himself and his cats, but he was now having to scrape and scrounge money for his higher-class ingredients. His business simply was not going to stay afloat without its main attraction.   
  
The detective was having less-pronounced but similar issues. Although he and Hanna had gotten quite clever and developed many creative ways of solving cases in the years they'd been working together, some mysteries were proving nearly impossible without Hanna's unique skill. More of the detective's cases were going unsolved. On top of that, the rushing in of winter made the whole city draw their coats tighter around themselves, and their purse-strings tighter as well. The desperate and the poor seemed worse off than ever, and crime rose steadily. The entire police force's wages were cut to account for the higher volume of crime. The detective took extra patrol shifts to make up for it, but the amount he earned still wasn't quite enough.   
  
“I don't _blame you_ ,” Hanna said as they warmed themselves with hot soup one evening. “But this winter is starting off pretty badly.”   
  
“I don't regret our decision,” the detective said, “but I do see what you mean.”   
  
“There is...-” The words were spilling out of Hanna just fine until he took a moment to think about them, and then they froze up in his throat. He'd determined months ago that inviting the detective to move in with him was not only what he _wanted_ to do, but was also the most logical course of action, and given their recent lapse into near-poverty, it made more sense than ever. But it was hard to say something you'd been keeping silent about for so long, he supposed. (This was not even the greatest of them, but the larger of his two most closely kept thoughts would have to wait.) “Er, the rent at your place is outrageous, isn't it? For what you get. The room is tiny.”   
  
“It is small,” the detective agreed. “I don't need much space, but it is beginning to seem a little costly, as of late.”   
  
“You could-” He paused for just a moment as some small part of him resisted speech, but he pressed on quickly. “-move in here. With me. You'd save a lot of money, and it's closer to your work, aaand the cats would be happy.”   
  
The detective was quiet for a terrible few seconds that stretched an impossibly long time, before he responded. “It's a good idea. My lease should expire within a month or so. I'll move in then.”   
  
“Ah-- oh. Um, good.” Hanna had been steeling himself for the man to say no, even though he'd been sure for months that he'd say yes. Somehow he'd thought the detective would put up a little bit of a fight, present any of several reasons why they shouldn't, or at least take some time to think about it. His easy agreement was nice, but it made Hanna think about all the things they rarely discussed, those reasons the detective hadn't argued. “So, uh, you don't think it will cause problems with your job?”   
  
“They shouldn't care,” the detective said. “It won't have a negative impact on my performance.”   
  
Hanna would have thought the man was missing his meaning (or being obtuse on purpose) if he hadn't been looking at him. Between bites, the detective's face was serious and thoughtful. He knew what Hanna was implying; he simply thought it wasn't anybody else's business, and apparently expected them to respect that. But Hanna didn't have quite the faith in people that his partner did, despite years of them rubbing off on each other. “They _will_ care though,” he said. “People are gossips.”   
  
“I'm sure I can handle it. If anyone brings it up to me, I'll just tell them the truth.”   
  
“Oh? What's that?” Hanna raised an eyebrow, but not so high as to seem sarcastic. He knew the truth, of course, which was that there was nothing for the gossips to worry their pious little heads about, no great sin to make them feel better about themselves, but the detective would never say it in such a way.   
  
“That it's none of their concern,” he replied with a subtle wry smile.   
  
Quite suddenly, Hanna felt better about the situation than he had in months. He hid his own smile behind a bite of a bread and said with a full mouth, “This soup is good. Did you do something different to it?”   
  
“Coriander,” the detective said, and it was clear in the amused lines on his face that the bread was not proving a very good disguise for Hanna.   
  
They didn't say any more on the subject of moving in or avoiding gossips or if the gossips might in fact have something to talk about at some point in the future. They didn't talk any more about coriander. But the cold wind outside must have died down and been replaced by a blanket of warm clouds because the chill faded from their little room and left things quite comfortable.   
  
xXx   
  
Despite the cold, dreadful winter, and being very nearly poor (and worse as the weeks wore on; it seemed nobody had a spare penny to spend these days, not even the rich in their heated houses), Hanna felt better than almost ever. He felt buoyant, like the little red flame in his heart was keeping him afloat. He hadn't had quite this level of light-hearted anticipation since he had first learned of his magical potential, and even then the gentle optimism had been overpowered by his thirst for knowledge and success.   
  
That wasn't to say he didn't suffer a sort of thirst now. But this was different; a thirst for water over wine.   
  
Though perhaps thirst was not the right explanation. Was there a sensation in which you could drink small amounts daily, enough to keep you going, but every drop made you want more? And you felt every single day that your need to drink your fill was growing, but that no amount could ever be enough?   
  
_'Maybe what I want is to go swimming,'_ Hanna thought, laughing at himself. Though, it was more of a metaphorical drowning he craved.   
  
He didn't know if the detective felt quite the same way, but the man did seem excited about the prospect of combining their meager households. He began bringing various possessions over each time he visited and stowing them in empty corners until Hanna made room on his shelves. (Hanna liked the new less-familiar clutter, loved to see their things next to each other in disorderly clusters. That seemed like how it should have been all along, and he was a little annoyed at himself that he didn't get around to asking the detective to move in sooner.) And even though there were so many more _things_ in the apartment, the place was cleaner than ever, thanks entirely to the detective. (He had cleaned up a fair bit in the past, but he hadn't wanted to intrude too much on Hanna's sovereignty in that respect, and so the apartment had remained only mostly clean; if it wasn't directly related to his ingredients, Hanna didn't especially care to organize or sterilize it.)   
  
“I've spoken with my landlord,” the detective said one afternoon while he was arranging pots and pans and other kitchen items which probably _had_ places they belonged but had rarely ever seen. “He's agreed to let me out of the contract at the end of the month. Will that be enough time for you?”   
  
A truly stupid question, in Hanna's opinion, and he said so, if not quite so rudely. “Too _much_ time,” he said, and managed to get only a little red in the face. “I mean, I don't care. You could move in immediately, for all the difference it would make.”   
  
The detective smiled. He said, “I thought as much,” and returned to his housework.   
  
The following day, apparently content with the state of the kitchen, he addressed Hanna about the next step in the moving process. “Have you asked your landlord for permission?”   
  
“Yes,” Hanna said, though he made a face as if to imply that he didn't exactly see why it mattered, particularly since the detective had all but slept at the place for years (and _had_ slept there on a few occasions). “He said he was fine with it and you could sign the lease whenever you're ready, but that he'd have to charge us more if we wanted him to supply more furniture. He did graciously offer to lend us a cot though.”   
  
“That's kind of him,” the detective said, and Hanna couldn't quite tell if he was joking. “However, I think I'll decline.”   
  
That was, in a way, saying a lot without saying anything, as Hanna was aware that the vast majority of furniture in the detective's apartment (meaning his bed and everything else aside from a little locked chest and a small table) belonged to the landlord and would be staying there for the use of the next tenant, and that neither of them (nor the both of them combined) had enough extra money to afford a whole 'nother bed frame, let alone a mattress. And surely, Hanna still didn't sleep much, but there were bound to be nights when the both of them needed rest at the same time. The detective was a bit given to the idea of martyrdom, yes, but it was highly unlikely that the man was planning to sleep on the floor for the duration of their combined habitation, which might, if Hanna had his way, be until they died.   
  
They still hadn't talked about this, but it was a conversation that was up-and-coming. Still, Hanna didn't know what to say or how to say it, and the detective apparently didn't find it to be a very pressing matter and so he kept quiet as well. (It wasn't likely that the detective simply couldn't find the right words; he always had the right words or, when that was not enough, the right moves. But he also had a rather leisurely sense of importance when lives were not on the line.) Hanna was _fairly_ sure that the two of them were on the same page, but with every day that the apartment became fuller of the detective's belongings and the man was not yet officially living there, he began to think harder about it, entirely involuntarily.   
  
It was possible that the detective simply wasn't interested in him in that sort of way, and had only been acting friendly. (Exceedingly friendly, but then the man was also exceedingly polite and exceedingly level-headed.) That would have been the common assumption with any other person, given that the sort of relationship in question was the subject of scandalous trials just often enough to dissuade most folks who were the slightest bit mindful of their social or legal reputation. Not only that, but Hanna would admit (if pressed) that he wasn't exactly the most conventionally attractive sort, what with looking like a gangly mess of an underage runaway, which the detective had pointed out more than once; not unkindly, nor in those words, but still. He wouldn't really expect anyone to be interested in pursuing a relationship with him, least of all someone as tall and truly decent-looking as the detective.   
  
That didn't mean Hanna didn't _hope_ the detective had some feelings for him, more than feeling that he was tolerable.   
  
But even if he didn't... _care_ for Hanna that way, and only cared for him as much as was already clear, it was obvious that meeting the detective was the greatest thing to have happened in his entire life, a statement that was in no way an exaggeration. It was not so much a realization as it was a reaffirmation of something he'd come to know over the years. If he hadn't met this man, Hanna wasn't sure what he would be doing with his life right now. Likely, it wouldn't be too different, but it would _feel_ different, he was sure. He'd certainly still be using necromancy, because nobody else had ever cared enough to suggest he stop.   
  
That was another thing he was grateful to the detective for. At first he was a little disappointed when he realized how the man disapproved of his magic, taking it as a personal offense, but that hadn't lasted long. It couldn't. The detective was not an offensive man, and he never said anything that wasn't important. If he criticized some aspect of Hanna or his actions, he realized, it was for Hanna's own good. And it _was_ good. It had only been just over a month since he'd stopped using black magic, but he felt much livelier (and without even increasing his vegetable consumption).   
  
Hanna wondered how Father Morris would feel about this, about what had become of his apprentice. Would he be disappointed that he quit necromancy? Would he feel rejected that Hanna no longer used what the man had taught him? It wasn't as if he regretted learning those skills; they were what brought him here, and they were useful for a good long time; he just did not need them any longer. He wondered if Father Morris had been as tired as _he_ had been, and likewise never noticed just how much of a toll the magic was taking.   
  
He wondered what the Father would think of his relationship with the detective. Morris was a priest, but... maybe there was more to that 'other side of the story' he spoke of than just magic. Maybe 'sin' was not so cut-and-dry as they'd always been taught. Maybe it didn't matter.   
  
What _did_ matter, at least for the time being, was that the cold winds were blowing mercilessly around the city, terrorizing the constant influx of immigrants and pushing everyone to extremes they would hardly consider in warmer states. A sense of guilt mixed with compassion caused Hanna to sell his charms at a significantly reduced rate, regardless of the fact that nobody was willing to pay his original asking price anyway. The detective was working harder as well, patrolling the frigid streets almost endlessly, or so it seemed to Hanna, who was always rather impatient to see him. They did meet still as often as the detective could, but that was sometimes only once per day, and only long enough for him to eat what was probably his sole meal of the day.   
  
The man was not looking his best when he delivered the news to Hanna a week before the expiration of his lease, but his unkempt state was just proof of the importance of the possibility.   
  
“I'm being considered for police chief,” he said as he sat down roughly at the table and dug into a sandwich he'd brought with him.   
  
“Wow,” Hanna exclaimed, honestly surprised that the higher-ups had finally dug their heads out of their asses and recognized the detective's potential. “When will you know if they choose you?”   
  
“It'll be weeks yet.” He looked contemplative, and Hanna realized why when he followed up with, “ _if_ I decide to run.”   
  
“What?” The sentence was almost incomprehensible to Hanna. “Why would you not want to run? And don't say it's because someone else would be better for the job. We both know that's not true.”  
  
The detective looked somewhat less stoic than usual, like he wanted to argue but was fighting himself over it, and a bit shy as well. (As if being unsure was something the man was capable of. Honestly, Hanna found the idea appealing, but didn't feel it was likely.) “I would rather follow through with our plan,” he said.   
  
That made Hanna a bit embarrassingly giddy, though nostalgically displeased that the man was still having to worry about the same old reasons he'd never been promoted before. It was unfair, and he was tired of it. Ples's words from some months ago came back to him before he could foolishly agree with the detective. “I would as well, but nothing is stopping you from doing both. I know I said people would care, and they will because people are asses, but what does that matter? As long as you don't care.”   
  
“I don't,” the detective said firmly. “But every aspect of my life will be subject to scrutiny if I take this job. I don't want to put you under any undue risk... any more than usual.”   
  
“You're worried about _me_?” Hanna asked, laughing, though even he wasn't sure why he was so incredulous. The man was always worried about him, whether or not the situation warranted the slightest amount of concern.   
  
“Of course. Would I be moving in with you if I didn't care about your well-being?”   
  
Hanna had nothing to say to that. It was a solid and silencing argument, not just logically, but emotionally. Still, he was not willing to let the man use such a really trifling detail to back out of a promotion he truly deserved (and which deserved him). He could worry over Hanna all he liked. “I still think you should do it. People and their talk won't hurt us, but a raise couldn't hurt either.” That reasoning was only mildly effective on someone as non-materialistic as the detective, so Hanna went on. “Erm, and it's, you know, the right thing to do. The city could use a chief who doesn't hide in the back pockets of the rich.”   
  
“...I suppose you're right,” the detective said after a moment. “If you think I ought to, then I will. Though running does not guarantee me the office.”   
  
“The people in charge having any sense at all guarantees you the office,” Hanna said, dismissive of the man's modesty. “And they hired you in the first place, so I have to assume they've got _some_ brains.”   
  
The detective smiled, sweetly mocking. “That's awfully generous of you.” _'Compared to your usual,'_ Hanna knew he meant. He agreed, and he attributed it entirely to spending so much time in the detective's presence, but he didn't want to use the excuse right now for fear of it losing its potency, as he was fairly sure it was going to become his only defense in coming years.   
  
Instead he said, “I reserve the right to rescind that statement if they _don't_ elect you. Which I will. I'll rescind it vigorously.”   
  
“That's fair enough.”   
  
xXx

Today was the day, when finally the detective was to move in with Hanna. ( _Finally,_ as it had felt like years that Hanna was waiting. Though, he supposed, it _had_ been years, in a sense, given that they'd known each other some six years now, and the subtle thrum of _wanting_ had manifested not long after their first meeting.) The man's own room lease expired the next morning so, true to his responsible nature, he was sure to have himself and all of his belongings removed from the premises plenty early. “Their new apartment” was comfortably stuffed with odds and ends collected by either or both of them across the years, which promised to make the transition easy, as material comforts did.   
  
The next step was the detective signing on to Hanna's lease. He'd wanted to have done it sooner, rather than procrastinating as Hanna was wont to do, but the both of them were busy, and then the landlord was busy, and so on and so forth until the current day.   
  
“Just put yer mark here,” the landlord said, lazily jabbing a finger somewhere underneath Hanna's signature. He didn't give the detective more than the very shortest of dubious looks, which most would interpret as wondering why the detective was moving in with someone like Hanna and if that meant what he perhaps thought it meant. Hanna, however, had known the landlord for some time and, though they didn't speak often, understood him well enough to realize the man was only unsure why the detective would be so unnecessarily honest as to sign any paperwork which was not strictly needed. (After all, he had no reason to dislike Hanna, who always paid his rent on time, but he was also a shrewd man who knew the importance of not being screwed over by people, which was practically inevitable when it came to financial matters, in his professional opinion.)   
  
The detective paused as his eyes lit upon Hanna's mark, and it took glancing down at the page himself for Hanna to figure why.   
  
“Oh, right.” He laughed, and rolled his eyes at the unusually honest signature, the flowing and mostly-legible _'Hannibal Falk Cross'_. “I forgot I never told you before. This was a long time ago, back when I was naïve enough to think it really mattered what name you wrote down.”   
  
“You were named after a general,” the detective said, as if pulling the statement from some deep place in his memory. “You said that to me once, didn't you? I remember now. It was the day you found out my name.” He seemed pleased about recalling it, and about the new information he had of Hanna, like it was a secret privilege.   
  
The landlord was bored by the exchange, and impatient. “Yer mark, if you would, _sir_ ,” he drawled, the word sounding unnatural in his raspy voice.   
  
With apologies, the detective did as he was asked, and the landlord went happily on his way, and their new, shared living status was official.   
  
Not, of course, that most of their acquaintances would even notice the difference. The detective had told his coworkers and superiors, but he hadn't offered Hanna any insight into what any of them thought on the matter. Hanna imagined that one man he was vaguely familiar with, the one who'd come looking for the detective that while back, and he could just see his face, disinterested but viciously satisfied in that way which gossips always were when something eventful happened.   
  
They returned upstairs and let themselves back into the apartment which, to Hanna, seemed... _brighter._ He stood in the middle of the room and absorbed it for a minute, letting the sense of peace overtake him momentarily. He turned around back to the detective, wondering what to say, but the man was already sitting down at the table and working on some papers he'd brought from the precinct, quietly focused and content. Hanna laughed at himself for being emotional. Of course the detective was not susceptible to that kind of nonsense; yes they'd just made a fairly large change, but it was a day like any other, not requiring any special words to mark the occasion. And so Hanna said nothing, and they carried on with the day as usual.   
  
Lunch and dinner were unremarkable affairs, aside from the fact that the detective was present for both of them. He had specifically requested the day off, to finish getting his things in order, in regards to his living situation. So they ate and worked around the house at a leisurely pace, without the detective's work schedule looming over their heads, and it was quite the nicest day either of them had had in some time.   
  
The evening, Hanna hoped, might follow the same trend.   
  
The sun's light had faded and been replaced by a bright moon-glow some hours ago. The silvery shine of it filtered down through the lumpy translucent glass of the room's one window and lit mostly upon the bed, where Hanna sat reading. Leastwise, he _appeared_ to be reading, much as he thought the detective only appeared to be deep in consideration of his remaining paperwork. There wasn't much to consider about the paperwork, which they'd gone over together earlier in their usual breach of governmental confidentiality, and even less of it was worth the far-away look the man had in his eyes.   
  
Hanna knew better than to ask if something was wrong. He knew, with at least some amount of certainty, what the detective was thinking, which was along the same lines as his own set of thoughts. What to say? What to do? Earlier, it had been fine to say nothing. _Most_ of the time, it was fine to say nothing, although that did little to ever stop Hanna. Now, however, the time had come to say or do _something._ Something to put them where they belonged, wherever that ended up being. He couldn't let this night slip silently by. He didn't want to.   
  
Deliberately, Hanna left his spot on the bed to return his book to the shelf across the room, his movements neither casual nor inconspicuous, and made to hang up his coat and other outer layers with as much rustling as the garments felt necessary. He stripped down to his underclothes as if it were any other night, as if he had no reason for modesty and there wasn't another man sitting at the table in the middle of the room and watching him undress unflinchingly.   
  
And the detective didn't pretend he wasn't watching. Hanna couldn't say that the man's eyes followed him hungrily, but they didn't shy away as he got as naked as was plausible on a drafty winter's night. The detective didn't quite give Hanna's warm but worn underthings a lusty once-over or any such dramatics, but he did seem to take Hanna's disrobing as a cue and closed up his work to follow suit. He hung up his coat, toed off his shoes next to Hanna's, and removed his vest and over-shirt with a stretch that seemed to show off every single one of his muscles. It was absolutely obscene, in Hanna's expert opinion, and worse, or better, was how the man did it in such a fluid, practiced motion, with no trace of the stage fright the magic-user was feeling.   
  
Continuing on without a hint of hesitation, the detective removed layers until he matched Hanna's bare-minimum. By this point, Hanna had already crawled backwards back up onto the bed and was sitting there, half cross-legged on top of the quilt, eyes quite locked on the unearthed expanse of his partner's body, rather visible even under a layer of winter underwear. He felt like he ought to say something, or like he normally _would_ say something, but as much as a million words were fighting to escape his throat, nothing came from his partly-opened mouth but a faint choking noise.   
  
As the room was not especially large, only a few steps separated them, and those steps were quickly taken, until only a few inches were between the two. The detective sat gently down upon the bed, only causing the springs to squeak lightly, in contrast with the way Hanna often fell heavily upon the thing with more weight than he even possessed in his thin body. He turned to face Hanna, and regarded him with a sort of patient curiosity.   
  
“Aren't you cold?” he asked, nodding down at the bed, the blankets doing a poor job from such a lowly position.   
  
“Not really,” Hanna replied, a nervous laugh caught partway in his throat with all those words he couldn't make use of. He could feel his face getting redder, just an example of the flush he felt throughout the rest of him. He probably could have opened the window and still felt quite warm, if the detective continued staring at him like that.   
  
The detective seemed to consider Hanna's response for a moment, before an answer to some unspoken question settled in his face, and he leaned forward, neither so quickly that Hanna didn't see it coming, nor slowly enough to be agonizing, and kissed him.   
  
For such an anticipated action, the gentle kiss left Hanna stunned. Without any sort of input from his brain, it seemed, he too leaned forward, into the kiss, and his hands found their way to the detective's upper arms, or shoulders, or back, or hips-- any and every place he might be able to hold to keep him here. The detective's hands were on him too, though not so desperate, one arm wrapped under Hanna's shoulder and up into the soft hair at the nape of his neck, the other hand resting lightly at his cheek. When their foreheads touched and Hanna's glasses were pressed directly between them, the detective reached up and removed them, carefully and slowly enough to give Hanna time to protest, but Hanna was happy to be rid of any barriers between them, especially as they were now so close that the detective seemed clearer than ever before. He could count the specks in his warm brown eyes.   
  
It wasn't long before they ended up lying diagonally across the bed, covers bunched up around them like a nest. Words were few, mostly soft questions from the detective about Hanna's comfort (and a single remark recognizing the pale, almost invisible freckles decorating the tops of Hanna's cheeks, too faint to have been seen at any greater distance), but speech didn't seem necessary. They moved by a combination of instinct and sheer wonder, sating curiosity with every touch and the expressions that joined them.   
  
It shouldn't have surprised Hanna, after all the years he'd known the man, that the detective's desires and motivations here were so aligned with his own. Still, there was a trembling in his heart to think that this wasn't some kind of dream, borne of too many nights alone when he was never quite certain if maybe it didn't have to be this way, nights when he hadn't allowed himself to imagine what it would be like or how it might happen, but had imagined them anyway. _This_ was much the same, but so much _more_ than any dream he could have conjured. His hands shook, inadvertently matching the rhythm of his heart.   
  
“Are you alright?” the detective asked, hot breath numbly tickling Hanna's ear as he pulled back to search his eyes for any sign that he should stop.   
  
Hanna laughed, somewhat from nervous instinct and partly because of the not-unpleasant shiver running through his chest and up into his throat. “I'm fine. Only having a hard time believing... all of this.” He squeezed the soft, warm flesh of the detective's sides where he held him, that strangely intimate space under the ribs that seemed just right for holding.   
  
“Is it too much? Do you want to stop?” He punctuated the question by sliding his thumb over the edge of Hanna's lip, in a move that was either unplanned and ironic, or devilishly deliberate. And despite the years they'd known each other, it wasn't entirely clear to Hanna which was more likely.   
  
There was no single part of him that wanted to stop, no bit of uncertainty that this was what he wanted, or wriggling root of ingrained morals to say that he shouldn't do this, so he said simply and clearly, “No,” with as much strength to his voice as he could muster. The tremble was still there, lurking in his chest, but he was starting to think that it might just be there from this point on, and he resigned himself to its not-unpleasant presence. “No,” he repeated, and leaned up to catch the man's lips again, to pull him back down where words were not necessary. It was not a place Hanna was familiar with, but he was more than glad to explore it.   
  
What little clothing they still wore was got rid of, tossed unceremoniously on the floor, to be sat on by a cat at a later date, no doubt. There was a moment, when finally nothing separated them but air, that they both seemed unable to breathe, though when the moment passed, their breaths returned to them heavier than the morning fog, and the weight forced them to collapse upon each other like a hot summer's day.   
  
As distracting as the entirety of his partner's body was, Hanna's mind still found the time to wonder if he was good enough, _pleasing_ enough to the detective. The man was gorgeous in every way, accomplished, capable, likable. Lovable, worthy of devotion. He could have anything, _anyone_ , if the rest of the world felt about him even close to how Hanna did, which they _ought_. Knowing this (as he surely must), how could the man be satisfied with the hard, sharp angles of Hanna's too-thin body and the conflict that followed him like a shadow? Well, he'd put up with the drama so far, and admirably well, and when Hanna's hard angles found just the right spots to fit so perfectly into the detective's own and caused the most wonderful and unrestrained noises he'd heard from the man thus far, Hanna pushed the worry aside.   
  
A stray breeze snuck in through the cracks and blew out the candle, but neither of them noticed. The moon was still bright, still illuminating the detective's face and reflecting off his eyes. He looked rather like Hanna thought angels were supposed to, not physically, but in an ethereal awe-inspiring way, like a slice of pure light and warmth in the darkness. The way he _felt_ , though, was purely human, in all the best of ways.   
  
Exploring one another, memorizing the patterns and shapes of their bodies through touch alone, was an experience like nothing else. They'd have continued quite happily on that winding path until some physical need stopped them, but an impatient knocking at the door interrupted them before exhaustion had the chance.   
  
“Johnson!” the officer called when he was not answered quick enough for his liking. Hanna begrudgingly let go of the detective and began the arduous and unfortunate process of disentangling their limbs. He huffed, 'annoyed' being too tame a word for what he felt about the officer's sudden presence, but his ever-patient paramour kissed him and turned his growl into a resigned and endeared sigh. It was, as always, too hard to keep up a bad mood when the detective was determined to handle things calmly.   
  
Furthermore, there was nothing to keep them from picking up where they left off the next night and every night that followed. So as much as he would prefer not to, Hanna let his partner up out of their bed to go answer the insistent knocking.   
  
The detective wrapped himself loosely in a blanket and padded over on his bare feet to open the door, leveling the other officer with a stare so sarcastic it sent joyful shivers down Hanna's spine.   
  
“Finally,” the officer said, as if he was the one who'd been waiting for this night for years upon years. Hanna could see from where he sat half-covered in the mess of bedsheets that it was his 'favorite' officer, the one who always seemed displeased to have to be anywhere near Hanna.   
  
“I assume this is important?” the detective asked, making no effort to pretend he hadn't just been very busy doing something far more interesting.   
  
The officer looked past him and into the darkness of the room beyond, and surely noticed Hanna sitting in the moonlight under the window, if his scowl was anything to judge by. But, to his credit, he didn't let it distract him for long. “There's been a murder. The mayor's wife. Suspect is hiding in the financial quarter, and the chief wants all hands on deck to find the bastard.”   
  
Any of the detective's lingering disdain for his job or co-worker melted away and he became the very model of professionalism in an instant. “Alright, I'll be out in a moment.” He closed the door and returned to Hanna's side, where he sat and absently wrapped his blanket around the magic-user's shoulders. “Sorry to have to leave like this,” he said, leaning in to kiss him again, and then biting his own lip like he wished he hadn't, because it only made him want to stay.   
  
“It's fine,” Hanna said with a shrug that was mostly hidden under the comforter. “It sounds important. Do you want me to come?”   
  
Already sorting through their pile of discarded clothing, the detective shook his head. “No, but thank you. I am sure we can handle it. I'll be back as soon as I'm able.”   
  
Hanna didn't especially like it, but this sort of situation (minus what had come before it) was fairly common, so he didn't protest. He watched the detective get dressed, which was not quite as enjoyable as the opposite but was still nice, particularly as he was not distracted by his own anxious anticipation this time.   
  
Before the detective could leave, however, Hanna was struck by a sense of unease. “Wait a minute,” he said, as the detective was donning his coat. He removed himself from his cocoon of blankets and went to rummage through the pockets of his own coat, where he pulled out a few miscellaneous charms. He didn't ask before he shoved them into one of the detective's pockets. “I know you don't care for them, but take them anyway. Since I'm not coming with you.” The _'please'_ was implied by the concern in his tone.   
  
Though Hanna was right that the detective _didn't_ prefer to carry any magic on him, still wary of it all, he humored Hanna's request with an extremely fond smile. “I'll be careful,” he said, and tugged Hanna close for an embrace that felt like a thousand other embraces wrapped into one. “Sleep well.”   
  
“I'll think about it,” Hanna replied, and waved half-heartedly as he watched him go.   
  
He wasn't really tired (after such an evening, he felt more invigorated than anything), but he went back to the bed and snaked under the blankets anyway, enjoying the warmth and the smell. By the time he realized he'd fallen asleep, the sun was on its way back up. It didn't seem the detective had returned yet, or if he had then he'd had to leave again. The apartment was still and quiet.   
  
It stayed calm for another couple of hours, during which time Hanna idly cleaned and organized and talked to his cats. Then shortly before noon, there was a knock at the door.   
  
“What can I do for you?” Hanna asked, aware that the young man at the door was only a messenger; he wasn't nearly nervous enough to need something for himself, although he did look rather hurried.   
  
The messenger bowed his head slightly in greeting. “Mayor Whitmore wants to talk with you,” he said.   
  
Hanna's first thought was that the servant had gotten the wrong address. What reason would the mayor have to talk to anyone on this side of town? It wasn't that Hanna never worked for people in power, but it wasn't common enough for him to be unsurprised whenever one wanted something from him.   
  
Then he remembered the officer, standing at the door some hours before, saying something about the murder of the mayor's wife. Already, he didn't like where he was sure this conversation was going to go.   
  
“I'm not interested,” he told the messenger. “Whatever the mayor wants, I'm sure I can't help him with it.” He laid his hand on the edge of the door and waited for the messenger to turn around instead of closing it in his face, but the messenger was not willing to be dismissed so easily.   
  
“He's offering to give you a good amount of pay upfront,” the young man said, pulling a heavy-looking pouch out from one of his pockets and holding it out to Hanna. “Just for talking to him. Sir, I don't know what he wants with you, but I was thinkin' about it the whole way over, and _I'd_ take the money.”   
  
Hesitantly, Hanna took the bag, and almost dropped it. This was probably more than he normally charged for his most expensive services. The weight wasn't comforting though; it made him feel cold, chilled throughout his body. It was a _lot_ of money though, from a very influential person. He hadn't worked for this mayor yet, but he knew how people in power were. If this man was willing to call on him, he would be willing to shell out an extraordinary amount of money.   
  
_'Which we don't need,'_ Hanna reminded himself. The detective was helping him pay rent now, and they'd been getting by _alright,_ if not strictly _well.  
  
_ The messenger could read the doubt on Hanna's face and in his silence. “Look,” he said, “Whitmore told me not to come back without you. He was real serious about talkin' with you. And that's _a lot_ of money for just talkin' with someone. Frankly, you'd be crazy not to do it.”   
  
He didn't need the messenger to tell him that; the pouch of gold in his hand was presenting its case well enough just by existing. And... the mayor did just want to talk, didn't he? All this money, just for hearing whatever it was he had to say. Hanna fidgeted while he thought it through for a minute, irritated, tempted, and trying to decide what was the _right_ thing to do. Finally, he grabbed his coat and told the messenger, “Okay. Let's go.”   
  
He left the bag of money sitting on the table without any sort of note, fully intending to be home before the detective had a chance to wonder why they'd suddenly gotten rich.   
  
xXx   
  
All the way on the other side of town from his run-down but homely apartment, Hanna found himself at Mayor Whitmore's sprawling up-town mansion, being led inside with all the haste and importance of a doctor to someone's deathbed. He expected to be left in some small, dark meeting room or antechamber and asked to wait until the mayor or whoever could meet him, but instead he was ushered upstairs and straight into a bedroom, where a haggard-looking man was clutching desperately at the hand of a woman lying unconscious in the bed.   
  
Knowing what he knew though, Hanna would bet the woman wasn't sleeping.   
  
The man stood in a hurry, though he didn't quite move to shake Hanna's hand. “Mister-- Mister Cross! Thank you for accepting my invitation. I've... I've heard of the sort of things you're capable of, and I am more than willing to pay you fairly for your services. I take it you received my gift?”   
  
_'Your bribe,'_ Hanna thought, though not unkindly. That money would feed them for at least a month. He nodded. “I did,” he said. “But I haven't agreed to anything yet. What exactly do you need?”   
  
The mayor (as he was sure it was the mayor, despite a lack of proper introduction and the man's nervousness. It was hard to miss politician-types or anyone who'd had a loved one pass recently), seemed confused, and Hanna realized that the man had probably only heard of that one particularly infamous skill of his, and hadn't been expecting to have to clarify. Maybe, like so many others, he didn't want to say the words. He recovered from the confusion quite quickly though.   
  
“My wife,” he said, breaking eye contact with Hanna as his gaze slid to the bed. “I need you to bring her back to life.”   
  
Hanna had _known_ , more than he'd wanted to admit, that this was exactly what the mayor was going to ask for. What else did anybody ever want of him but his dark talents? And they didn't even know what they were asking, how heavy this request was. Even he hadn't known until he'd stopped, and now it weighed on him.   
  
He shook his head. “I'm sorry, Mr. Whitmore. I don't do that anymore.”   
  
“You _don't_?” the mayor asked, expression unyielding. “But that doesn't mean you _can't;_ am I correct?”   
  
Given the circumstances and the promise he'd made, there was so little difference between the two as to render the concepts identical. “I can't,” Hanna clarified. “I'm not going to. I'm sorry for your loss, Mr. Mayor, but I suggest you move on.” He had only taken one step back before the mayor grabbed his sleeve.   
  
“You can't say that!” the mayor snarled, less ferocious than desperate. “If you've never lost someone, you can't just say to move on! I didn't get a chance to even say goodbye.”   
  
Hanna yanked his sleeve free of the man's grip, but didn't storm out of the room as he'd somewhat intended to. This man had no idea what he'd been through in his life. People were always like that-- assuming they had it the worst. But he _had_ lost people, so he knew: moving on was the last thing you wanted to do, when you knew there was another option. _He_ had turned his whole life upside down just to see his parents again, just for one short minute. So he understood.   
  
Yet, he couldn't go back on his word.   
  
He didn't have the chance to even say so; the mayor was as persistent as grief could make a man. “You haven't even heard my offer! I assure you, I can pay! More than your standard fee. Ten times as much!”   
  
Given that the man didn't know how much Hanna normally charged, this was quite an assertion, but one Hanna did not doubt. His heart skipped a beat at the thought of that much money, all at once, for one simple job. That much money-- he might not be able to carry it home on his own. That much money would keep him and the detective warm and fed and clothed and housed for nearly a year, other jobs aside.   
  
_'As if we're only mouths to feed,'_ he thought quite viciously.   
  
“I don't care about the money,” Hanna said, heedless of sounding unconvincing, because that was his story and he was sticking with it regardless of if it sounded believable.   
  
The mayor was a bit taken aback; that wasn't something he likely heard every day, in a city like this, but his persuasive politician's nature kept him bargaining. “But surely there is _something_ you want,” he suggested. “If not money, then influence? There is much you can do if you know the right people!” He must have seen some telling emotion flicker over Hanna's face, because the man smiled. “That's right. Detective Johnson is in the running for Chief, isn't he? The two of you are rather close, from what I understand. I could put in a good word for him, if you take my meaning. As Mayor, I hold quite a lot of power over these elections. If you would just help me now, I can make sure things go your way in the coming weeks!”   
  
Hanna was trembling, hard enough that it caused him to draw blood when he bit down on his lip accidentally. A guarantee from the mayor was no small thing. That was quite exactly what he wanted, even if he hadn't arrived with the thought. There was nothing he wanted more than for the detective to be finally recognized for all his skill and hard work. He wanted this job, and Hanna wanted him to have this job. It was shaping up to be the only thing missing from their new collective life. And the mayor could give it to them.   
  
What was more, though Whitmore was not saying so, was that he could also just as easily guarantee that the detective _not_ get the job. And if he was feeling _particularly_ vindictive over Hanna's refusal, it was likely he could cause a significant amount of other trouble for them as well. Hanna hadn't admitted to anything yet, not his skills or his relationship or that he was even the person the mayor had meant to hire, but that would not matter in the slightest if he made the mayor truly angry. If Hanna did not help, the mayor could and likely _would_ ruin him.   
  
_'And he's not asking much,'_ Hanna thought. _'Nothing I haven't done more times than I can count.'  
  
_ “Okay,” he said, setting his expression to be as professional as he could. “You just want to say your goodbyes, right? I can give you a few hours.”   
  
The mayor scowled in confusion. “What do you mean? A time limit? No, I want you to bring her _back_. To life!”   
  
This was the worst part of this particular service, the bargaining. He hated having to explain to people that you couldn't simply bring a person back from the dead as if nothing had ever happened. “It doesn't work that way,” he told Whitmore, trying not to seem annoyed too badly. “It's not possible to bring someone back long term. Besides, the police already know she was killed. Would you want her to have to hide the rest of her life away in this room?”   
  
From the faraway look in his eyes, it seemed Mayor Whitmore was frantically trying to devise a plan. “Suppose we claim she was only badly wounded,” he said. “That she fell into a deep unconsciousness. I'll have her stay in bed until it would be plausible for her to have recovered.”   
  
It wasn't a bad excuse, really, especially as told by someone with as much charm and influence as the city's leader, but there was still no way Hanna could bring someone back to life forever, and he told the mayor as much.   
  
“Then how long can you give me?” Whitmore asked, grasping for as much time as he could coerce out of the magic-user. “A few hours simply won't be enough. Regardless of my personal feelings, I know my wife would want to make arrangements and see her family one last time, which could easily take weeks. I must have more time, I really must!”   
  
This situation was so far from ideal, and drifting ever further the more he _let_ it, but Hanna was fairly certain there was no getting out of it now. He sighed, mad at himself for getting into this sort of trouble, but also... a little excited by the prospect of practicing this spell again, in what would probably be the trickiest configuration he'd ever done. “I can give you a week,” he said, part of him struggling to commit, and the other part struggling not to. “But it'll have to be done under very specific circumstances. Can we agree?”  
  
“Anything!” the mayor said, overjoyed. He moved to shake Hanna's hand, and he let him.   
  
Hanna stepped back to gain a bit of personal space and stuffed his hands in his pockets, suddenly quite self-conscious. “Alright. She'll have to stay in bed the entire week,” he told Whitmore, who nodded readily. “Nobody can be allowed to see her for more than an hour at a time, except us. And I'll have to stay close by the whole time.”   
  
It didn't seem that the mayor was especially upset by Hanna's last stipulation, but it did cause him to ask, “Is that necessary?”   
  
In all honesty, Hanna was not sure what would be truly necessary or not in a resurrection like this. He planned to put the circle on the woman's body, even though he was having her stay still, just in case she were to fall from the bed or something strange were to happen. But he had never ventured very far from a resurrected corpse, and didn't want this to be the time he found that distance severed the spell. That seemed a likely-enough outcome, as it was his magical energy that fueled it. If he were to die, he was fairly sure that anyone he had currently resurrected would die as well, so chancing distance or any other interruption of the energy between them was not a wise risk.   
  
“It might not be,” Hanna said, “but I doubt either of us wants to find out. To be safe, I should stay in the house.”   
  
The mayor nodded. “That will be fine. I'll have a room set up for you.”   
  
With those basic safety measures set, Hanna got the final go-ahead from Whitmore and went to work. The mayor stayed and watched as Hanna sorted through his pouches and carefully measured out ingredients.   
  
“I appreciate you helping me with this,” Whitmore said.   
  
“I appreciate the money,” Hanna responded, though the pay wasn't half the reason he'd agreed to the job, and the mayor knew it.   
  
“Is it alright for you to be away from your normal schedule for a whole week?” the mayor asked, though it wasn't likely that he would just let Hanna go home if the necromancer suddenly decided that it _wasn't_ fine.   
  
And, indeed, it was not exactly alright for Hanna to be gone so long, but he wasn't going to complain to his benefactor about it. He had committed to this job, so he would see it through, even if that required being away from his cats and his home and his somewhat-newfound love for much longer than he was comfortable with.   
  
Which, of course, brought him to thinking about the detective. The previous night had been so very _good_ he could hardly think of words to describe it. 'Legendary' drew close, though using such a word would have surely seemed facetious to anyone who hadn't actively experienced it. Hanna had been hoping-- in fact, planning-- to continue right where they'd left off, before they'd been interrupted. Now it seemed that would have to wait.   
  
“It'll be fine,” he told Whitmore. “I'll send a note to the detective when I'm done setting this up. Ah, ask him to feed my cats and such.”   
  
What _would_ he write, though? (Sith and Sabo didn't need to be fed, but Hanna knew they'd get plenty of scraps from the detective, even without his asking.) They were partners, now more than ever, and partners were meant to keep each-other well informed. And if Hanna didn't tell the detective what was going on, if he came up with some plausible lie or said nothing at all, he knew the man would find out from his fellow officers, because someone in the police force was bound to catch wind of Mrs. Whitmore's 'survival' as soon as she awoke. The others may not suspect anything strange, but very little could get past the detective's sharp instinct. The lie wouldn't keep for long, if Hanna could even stand to try it.   
  
But he didn't want to tell him. He didn't want to have to admit that he'd gone back on his word, because he had been doing so well and the detective was so proud of him. Honestly, there was no way he should have given in so easily. He knew what the detective would say if Hanna told him his excuses: that money wasn't important and he didn't need the promotion and they shouldn't fear whatever threats Hanna was sure the mayor was implying. The carefully-cultivated parts of Hanna agreed, the parts that wanted to be fearless like his partner, but his instinct felt rather the opposite, that they _did_ need money, and he _wanted_ the promotion, and a reasonable amount of fear was what kept people alive (people like the detective notwithstanding, as he clearly survived through some inhuman degree of morality). He didn't expect that the detective would agree with Hanna's reasoning, but he hoped at least that the man would accept his excuses.   
  
After this, he decided, he really would quit practicing necromancy entirely. He would not let anyone sway him again.   
  
_'Easy enough to say,'_ some doubtful bit of him thought. _'After this, there won't be anything more we want. Until something else comes up, of course.'_  
  
Hanna ignored the stray thought and decided to focus on the spell. He would write that note when he was done, and he would say he was sorry next week. For now, he needed to make sure the spell worked. His little jar of paint was all mixed except for the final ingredient. He rummaged through his pack for a small knife, smaller than the one he used to carry and hidden farther down beneath the rest of his materials, just in case he needed it.   
  
With the knife blade resting on his palm, Hanna glanced over to Whitmore, but of course the mayor had no input. Hanna wished for just a second that the detective was here to stop him, but then he pushed the thought away and cut into his hand, siphoning the blood carefully into the vial. He squeezed until he could hardly stand the pain; to bring someone back for an entire week would call for more blood than he had used in any single spell before. When he was satisfied with the amount, he hastily bandaged his hand and stirred the blood into the rest of the paint.   
  
Then he uncovered the woman. When he saw her face, he admonished himself for not checking first. He knew she had been killed, but he hadn't even bothered to ask how. It was obvious now that she had been shot in the head, the bullet entering through the cheek and exiting behind her ear. Hanna suddenly didn't feel as confident about anyone claiming she had survived such an attack.   
  
“You _are_ capable of bringing her back, aren't you?” Whitmore asked.   
  
“That's not an issue,” Hanna said, “but this is pretty gruesome. I can add a glamour, but it won't make anyone forget it if they've already seen it.”   
  
Whitmore waved Hanna's concern away. “That will be fine. It was a stressful occasion. I'm sure people can be convinced that they only imagined the severity of the wound.”   
  
It was true, Hanna knew the power of suggestion was not to be underestimated. He still wasn't sure, but he took the mayor's word for it (and hoped that the man would take the fall, if it came down to it) and continued on. Of course he was stopped by Whitmore's indignant “excuse me, what are you doing?” when he pulled the woman's dress up rather indecently high.   
  
“I've got to put the spell on her somewhere nobody is going to see,” he explained, smacking the man's hand away from where he was trying to pull the skirt back down. “The upper thigh is the safest place. Trust me that I'm not trying to take advantage of your wife. Or if you'd rather I stop, then that's your decision.”   
  
The mayor backed off after that and let Hanna work. It took some time to paint the circle and all the tiny, intricate runes on the woman's skin. He worked as delicately as possible, though he found a few times that his hands were shaking so hard he had to stop for a moment. The mayor did not leave the room the entire time, but luckily Hanna was quite used to working under scrutiny, so it did not distract him.   
  
When finally the spell was set, Hanna took the woman's hand and removed what he assumed was her wedding ring, curling it into his bandage-covered palm. Then, with a meaningful look at the mayor, he began the incantation.   
  
“ _Retornasti ad m--_ oh. What is her name?”   
  
“Martha,” the mayor said, his mouth hanging open somewhat as he watched Hanna begin again.   
  
“ _Retornasti ad me, o Martha Whitmore spiritus de excelso caelorum ubi cubes.”_  
  
As ever, there was no flash of light or sudden gasp for air to signify that she was 'alive' once more, but the body of Martha Whitmore began to stir, slowly, as if she were waking from a dream, a possibility that was quite real, as Hanna still did not know from where the spirits returned.   
  
“Dear Martha!” the mayor whispered, as he came to her side, a look of reverence on his face. He held her hand, rubbing it comfortingly as her eyes flickered open. Her expression, if it could be called such a thing, was blank, perhaps tired and confused. She pulled herself into a sitting position and looked around the room, though no recognition dawned in her glazed eyes.   
  
A wriggling worm of unease grew in Hanna's stomach as Mayor Whitmore lunged forward to embrace his wife, and time seemed to slow to an impossible crawl during which Hanna could do nothing. In agonizing slow detail, he watched as Martha put her arms around Whitmore, and laid her head upon his shoulder. He couldn't look away as she stared at Hanna with that endless and empty gaze and in a gritty, inhuman voice whispered the name that so few in this city knew. If he hadn't understood before, there was no doubt now, as the woman's delicate fingers stretched and split and lengthened into terrible, otherworldly claws and then flexed menacingly before digging deep into Whitmore's back.  
  
The man made a pained gurgle before he slumped down in Martha's grasp. She let his body fall to the floor, and though Hanna wondered if the man was still alive, he knew it didn't matter; what had invaded this room now was far worse than death, and perhaps more tenacious. Dead or alive, there was no escaping it.   
  
Still, Hanna didn't resign himself to the fate it had in store for him. He could feel the tension in each individual muscle as he strained to get away, half turning to run as she came for him. Her speed and energy were on a whole other level, the demon already adjusted to its new body and without another conscience inside to fight it. Where had the real Martha Whitmore gone? Had she heard the call from the other side at all, or been shoved out of line by the greedy monster who wanted a physical form so badly?   
  
Hanna flailed out of the way of her unnatural reach, and was spared from the worst of the damage her claws had meant to inflict. Several long scratches trailed diagonally down his right forearm, but he didn't feel more than a sharp tingle, too focused on dragging his limbs backward, toward the door, toward escape. His hands inched down toward his pockets and grabbed anything they could find, even as the demon came at him again in what seemed like light-speed. He stepped back, still hardly feet from the burning eyes in her sagging dead face, and threw one handful then another of whatever he'd found in his coat. She seemed stunned for a good long moment, and when she blinked back at him after that still silence, Hanna thought that perhaps, somehow, he had shocked the demon out of her.   
  
But then a frightening look came over her, pulling the sleepy features of her face into an excited grin. She stumbled back, brought her claws up before her face and looked at them with an expression of wonder, before dragging them down over her face and chest, slicing her entire front to slippery red ribbons. Hanna choked hard on a gasp, and watched in horror as she clawed away at the strange, undying body, spilling more blood than he had ever seen at any one time, until all the layers of her dress had fallen away and left exposed the small, intricate reanimation-circle on her thigh. A happy growl seemed to shiver up through what was left of her, vibrating through the bones in place of shredded vocal chords, and she sliced the spell into several uneven chunks of flesh, and the body fell into a grotesque heap on the floor.   
  
Hanna's eyes and throat burned, though whether from un-shed tears or from the insidious sulfurous presence of the demon, he didn't know. The air around him and inside his lungs felt thick with ghastly hot fumes, choking him and pressing on him from inside and out and forcing him to stillness when all he wanted to do was run. A whisper on the air, a sick warm breath in his ear, spoke to him in ways he didn't quite understand but could _feel_ invading him through his skin.   
  
_'This wasn't what I wanted,'_ he thought helplessly, and he could feel it thinking back, _'but it is what I want. I want. I get what I want.'_  
  
Like a searing venom, Hanna could feel it in his veins, like it was boiling all the blood inside of him. Again he tried to jerk his body back toward the hall, but nothing happened. He was frozen; it had taken over him. He could not even control his heart as it changed its rhythm, not beating fast in fear but in line with some hellish dance. His eyes blinked rapidly, and his neck creaked as his head turned stiffly to look about the room, but none of it was him.   
  
Entirely without his consent, Hanna's body left the room and began down the stairs and to the foyer of the massive house. His vision began to turn cloudy, and his mind along with it. Nonsensical chittering filled all the empty spaces in his thoughts, derailing most of them before they could finish.   
  
_'This is fine,'_ a rough approximation of his own voice tried to tell him, and it was hard for him not to believe it because he couldn't find his own real voice to respond.   
  
_'No problems,'_ it told him, as it manipulated his limbs, forced his legs to take one step and then another and then another out of the mayor's house, out through the fancy garden, out into the streets. _'I will go home,'_ it thought for him, as his legs took them there.   
  
The journey across town was a blur of half-seen people and buildings and shadows between them, and the strange sensation of not being in control of which direction his eyes looked or how they focused. He couldn't see if people were looking at him strangely, wary of his staggering or whatever expression he had on his face, and he couldn't understand his thoughts enough to know if he even cared. He was barely aware of the distinction between the world and the haze he was trapped in, until he took his first step upon the stairs of his apartment.   
  
It wasn't only his apartment anymore.   
  
As violently as he could, Hanna lashed out, hoping to knock the demon out of him or perhaps throw his body off the stairs, but his feet only stumbled a bit. He tried again, to a similar effect, and was hit full-force with the frustrating feeling of being physically restrained. _'At least,'_ he thought, and he found that he _could_ think, _'at least I'm feeling something.'  
  
_ The struggle only caused a delay in his arrival at his door, rather than resulting in his having fallen to his death, as he almost hoped it might. Though Hanna fought, the demon reached forward and laid his hand upon the doorknob, and turned, and if Hanna had had the presence of mind for it, he'd have been surprised, because the door would not open. The demon rattled the knob, pushing and pulling angrily and causing a strain on the door, but it could not gain entry.   
  
For a moment, Hanna's small presence in the back of his own mind felt triumphant, even as the demon seethed. He could feel it trying to calculate, to plan what it would do if it could not get inside (though he couldn't understand its motives still, not quite), but before it could get desperate enough to claw its way through a wall, the door opened and the detective looked out at them.   
  
“Hanna?” He greeted them with a small but vaguely confused smile and then turned back to the apartment, leaving them to follow. He walked over to the stove-top where a pot of water was boiling, and began adding things to it, only glancing over his shoulder to see from the corner of his eye if Hanna had followed. Then, facing the stove again, he tilted his head a bit and said, “I'm glad you're home,” and though Hanna could not see his expression, he knew the man was smiling, knew it even through the thick fog in his mind.   
  
Seeing the detective caused a strangely painful stab of feeling to shoot through his body, and the demon stumbled slightly where they stood just inside the doorway.   
  
_'No,'_ it said in their brain, _'I am happy to see him. Just happy.'_ And it was so very true that Hanna was almost entirely convinced, almost placated enough to stop yanking at the bonds that kept him where he was. He was certainly happy to see him, wasn't he? Happy to see his love, to be close enough to hold him again. He closed the door behind him and then took a few steps towards the man.   
  
But he could feel every single muscle and tendon in his body, the strange pulsing rhythm in his veins, the strain of his eyes as they focused on the detective's back. And he could feel, like sharp tree bark growing under the skin of his arms all the way down past his wrists and out, the growth of his fingernails into claws, and he couldn't think exactly why this was wrong but it was so familiar and it hurt so bad (not in his hands but in his heart) that he yanked _hard_ at his bonds, just to get it to stop. And it did stop, for just one halting second, enough that the arc of Hanna's arm and his mangled hand was off enough to almost miss its mark.   
  
But it didn't miss. Claws carved through the detective's back like it was a slab of clay, though Hanna felt it like scraping rough against stone. He couldn't breathe, his chest and lungs and heart hurt like maybe the demon had forgotten its host needed air and Hanna had only just become aware that he was dying.   
  
The detective didn't scream (was, perhaps, not even capable of making such a jarring noise, even on the best of days), but he gave a harsh pained grunt along with a heavy reverse gasp, all the air rushing out of his lungs in surprise. He fell, hands grasping at the edge of the stove and nearly knocking the boiling pot onto the floor. He landed hard on his knees, collapsing to one side and hunched into himself as he struggled to catch a breath through the pain. He looked back over his shoulder and for one fleeting second his expression was vicious. Then, whatever he saw, the instinctive fight in his eyes faded into a sad kind of resignation, and he turned back to lean his head against the floor tiredly, half-controlled sobs of pain pushing out of him with each shallow breath.   
  
“God, no,” Hanna cried, both shout and whisper, and the strength of it forced it out into the air where it belonged, despite the vice grip the demon still held over his body. Hanna could feel the damn thing smiling, and he could feel it bunching up his muscles to reach back again for a second strike.   
  
_'Over my dead body,'_ Hanna thought in rage, the turn of phrase more literal and sincere than perhaps anything he'd ever thought before.   
  
_'Small,'_ it seemed to think back at him. _'You are so small. You can do nothing.'_  
  
Whereas before the demon was gentle and placating in its speech, it clearly no longer cared to trick Hanna into calm submission. The fog cleared a little from his mind as the demon focused instead on physical control, laughing into Hanna's brain as it reared up to deliver another blow to the detective, who still laid in a shivering heap on the floor.   
  
“I said no!” Hanna yelled, in his mind or into the room, and staggered back a few full steps. A battle of wills ensued, with Hanna fighting through types of pain he never could have imagined to keep back the demon's straining conscience. In a stuttering motion, he managed to bring his arms up, clawed fingertips resting on his chest, while on the inside he hacked away at the walls that surrounded him, just struggling to get out.   
  
The demon screeched at him, horrible sounds beyond his worst nightmares, noises that reverberated throughout his entire being. _'I will have you!',_ it shrieked, its frustration causing more pain to Hanna than the claw-tips piercing his flesh.   
  
The pain was searing, white hot, worse than he had thoughts to describe, but when he thought the burning and blinding might overpower his rage, it subsided. He landed on the floor, feeling heavy and boneless and dizzy, his lungs aching, his chest stinging, his mind reeling, and everything else numb. He'd have sat there basking in sublime relief if he hadn't looked up and seen the murky red puddle slowly oozing toward him.   
  
He scrambled over on his hands and knees, slipping in the viscous blood and falling just short of landing on the shredded mess of the detective's back. “No, hey, please,” he whispered hoarsely, setting his shaking hands on the man's neck and shoulder, feeling... just feeling, and so unsure, and his vision was clouding again, warm wet tears falling down his face like hot sticky blood was falling down his chest, both dripping and landing in the gashes underneath. Gently, Hanna pulled the detective onto his side, his free hand rushing to cup his face and feel the soft warmth. There wasn't much left.   
  
The detective's eyes were half open, his tired eyelids struggling not to fall, it seemed. Only the faintest of breaths came from his slightly parted lips, but the rest of his body was limp, as if all of his energy had been redirected to his lungs. A wet raspy noise came from his mouth, quiet but terribly noticeable in the surrounding silence. Aside from the heavy drips of blood falling and his own pounding heartbeat, it was the only sound Hanna could hear.   
  
Rather desperately, Hanna leaned in close and tried to get the man to look him in the eyes. “Wait,” he pleaded, like he could stop the detective from leaving just by appealing to his senses, like it was any other day and the only place he had to go was work. Like he could stay another few minutes if only Hanna asked nice enough, gave him _that look._ But even as he searched his eyes for some sign that the man understood his plea, the soft shallow breaths faltered and stopped, and his struggling eyelids stilled. Beneath them, Hanna could see his partner's warm brown eyes turn glassy and dry, and entirely static, the telltale sign that all life had left them.   
  
Immediately, the speed of time seemed to return to normal. It was too fast, flying by as Hanna's scattered mind tried to think of something he could _do._ He could hardly hold on to any fragment of thought as they zipped through his brain, memories and hopes, disorganized bits of runes and snatches of incantations, pieces of them all patching themselves together in ways that made no sense. He was whispering them in a hurried stream, interrupted by his breath hitching on a sob every third or fourth word. It was a spell-- he could feel that-- but it was no spell he'd ever known before or would know again.   
  
Hours passed, tracked in the back of his mind by the slice of sunlight that rolled across the floor and fell finally upon the edge of the pool of blood before fading away. He still had his head bent over the detective's body, so low that his forehead rested on the man's chest as he continued his nonsensical incantation. Hanna's face was sticky with dried tears and worse with half-dried blood, as were his hands, his knees where he knelt, his hair where he had pushed it back, his glasses where they had fallen in the puddle and been left. The detective's body was covered in it too, his back flat on the floor now, his shirt soaking it all in. There was so much blood, so much.   
  
The night might have come and gone and left the morning to find Hanna still whispering hoarsely and clutching at a cold and lifeless body, if the reaper hadn't spoken up.   
  
Ples cleared his throat, and Hanna looked up at him blearily. “Hanni--”   
  
“Don't,” Hanna said, almost choking on the simple word. “Please.”  
  
The reaper did not ask for clarification; he knew. “Mr. Cross,” he said instead. He kept his eyes locked on Hanna's, trying to impart a sense of importance or urgency. “You cannot stay here for much longer.”   
  
That much was obvious to Hanna, even if nothing else quite was. As his mind cleared and quieted, he started coming to his senses and remembering. This wasn't real. It was a dream, just a memory, and he wanted out. “I know,” he told Ples. “I'm trying but I can't, can't wake up.”   
  
Ples either ignored Hanna or didn't understand that he wasn't simply being dramatic. “You need to leave, soon. They will be looking for you, after the mess you left at the mayor's house.”   
  
“I didn't mean to,” Hanna said, looking away from the reaper and gazing down at the body in his arms. He'd closed the detective's eyes quite a while ago, in some vain hope that he could convince himself the man was only sleeping. He did look more peaceful now than he had before, but that was saying very little. It was an illusion, anyway. It all was, and he wanted to be done with it. But it was still wrapped tight around him, hurting just the same as the first time, and it wouldn't let go.   
  
“I'm sorry,” Ples said, a slight thickness to his voice from the honest emotion. “But there's nothing you can do for him anymore.”   
  
“I could--...” _  
  
'Bring him back?'_ he thought at himself, disgusted. _'Go back on your word again? Do exactly what got you into this mess? Invite that demon back in again?'  
  
_ “No, you're right,” he told Ples, closing his eyes against the sight of the reaper and the rest of the world. Gently but abruptly, he laid the detective's hand back down across his chest, only now aware that he'd even been holding on to it, and then he stood. His joints cracked from breaking his long stillness, and his blood-caked clothing was stiff. The pool of blood was tacky where he stepped in it, and he wondered if it hadn't already begun to drip down between the floorboards.   
  
The reaper waited patiently for Hanna to move and look away before he reached forward and twisted the dead man's soul into a tight little ball and tuck it off into a pocket of air. Hanna saw over his shoulder the sorry look Ples gave him, but he knew the reaper had to do his job. No amount of pleading would see the detective's soul put back in his body. The man didn't want that anyway; hadn't he said that?   
  
“Where will you go now?” Ples asked. “I feel the darkness searching for you, not the least of which is the fear that lurks in these human hearts.”   
  
“I don't know,” Hanna said. He went across the room to grab his coat before he remembered that he was already wearing it. The detective's coat was there, though; hung up neatly by the door. Hanna reached inside the pocket where he'd stuffed a few charms earlier, and sure enough they were still there, and doing nobody any good. He left them and went to the door instead. With his hand on the knob, he turned to look back at the room. Much of it was lost in shadow, but he knew every corner and every crack, all the stains and burns and where the paint was peeling off the walls, without having to see any of it. In the same way, he knew the man who belonged to the body laying still by the kitchen corner, just out of the beam of moonlight, and he knew the man would not want him to linger just to be arrested by police and later charged with murder and witchcraft and everything else they would surely think to stick him with.   
  
He was guilty, but he wasn't about to let the police tell him that. The only one on the force with the right to accuse him or understand what his guilt meant was gone. The rest could go to hell.   
  
There was nothing left to see in the small apartment, and so much he wished he never had to see. He didn't take any of his things with him; no supplies, no clothes, no personal bits, no amulets, just what he had stuffed in his pockets. And he didn't take a second glance back before he went out into the hall and closed the door behind him. The police would be there soon, and Hanna thought he might regret missing their difficulty getting past the runed lock if every ounce of his humor hadn't bled out of him.   
  
Ples followed him a while, ghosting silently after him as he left the building and the district and the city altogether, though he stopped as soon as Hanna began to follow a dirt path out into a field. Hanna looked over his shoulder at him, and they stared at each other a few moments before the reaper just nodded and disappeared.   
  
To his knowledge, there was nothing in the direction in which Hanna was headed, and that suited him just fine. 'Nothing' was all he was ready to handle. He walked, and he kept walking, following the long hard path toward _nothing_ and away from everything. The road wound on, as did the days and years in a blur of emptiness, tinted dim and grey from the depleted reserve of his emotions.   
  
He didn't feel that there was a point to any of this anymore, but he figured he had to wake up _some_ time.

 


	12. Chapter 12

He did awake, slowly, struggling to pull himself out of the haze of both emotional and physical discomfort. The physical part became obvious when he opened his eyes and realized he'd fallen asleep curled up on the couch, a.k.a. the worst place to sleep in the entire apartment complex, perhaps including the stairwell. He was pretty sure he'd have a bruise from the springs digging into his left side. (And imagine if he weighed anywhere near average, how much more it would have hurt.)  
  
None of that had anything to do with why Hanna was feeling so emotionally _destroyed_ though. _That_ was all due to the dream, which came back to him without much effort, so easily he thought it might have been harder to _not_ think of it. But not thinking of his dreams had gotten him nowhere the past week. Sure, he liked to just get up out of bed and pretend it had never happened, but it was pretty clearly way past time to start taking those horrible memories seriously. He had a feeling that if he'd consciously devoted some time to perusing his past during his waking hours, they'd have left him alone as he slept. Instead, they'd come at him when he had no way to filter them, and he'd had to deal with the full intensity of emotions they wrought. So, yes, now it was time to give those thoughts a bit of attention, which absolutely entailed explaining them to the other person they were likely to have any effect on.  
  
And speaking of his undead companion-- the man was still sitting there where he'd seen him last (really _seen_ him), on the other side of the couch, suffering Hanna's feet tucked up under his leg. When Hanna turned his neck to look at him, the zombie met his gaze, moving his left hand from where it'd been resting on the laptop and setting it instead on Hanna's calf.  
  
“You're awake,” he noticed, before apparently noticing further details. “Are you alright?” he asked, his face scrunching up just the slightest bit in concern.  
  
Hanna's hand went to his face to check for tears, but there was no wetness or sticky tracks where they'd recently been. He figured he just looked, you know, generally distraught, which was fair because that was pretty much how he felt; not bad enough to have been crying, probably, but yeah, definitely _bad._ Given that, he answered, “Not really,” as he slowly sat up. He looked at his friend though, maybe the first time this week he'd looked at him with a clear head instead of a conscience plagued with guilt and anxiety, and he realized that... despite things not being exactly perfect, they certainly could be a hell of a lot worse. His dream was still bright in his memory as a reminder. So he changed his answer. “I mean, I guess actually I am,” he said, giving a sort of half-assed smile.  
  
“Did you have another dream?” the zombie asked. ( _'Belisarius,'_ Hanna thought, because even if they got back to normal, whatever that was, it wasn't likely he was ever going to start calling him 'Christopher'. It'd be too weird.)  
  
The question was a great segue into the conversation they needed to have but, of course, Hanna was still finding it hard to know where to start, other than blunt honesty. “Yeah,” he answered for now, while he fumbled for a gentle way to break the ice. (But was there such a thing? Physically speaking, not metaphorically, the whole process of _breaking_ something was violent by nature. Who ever thought it would make a good metaphor for easing into a conversation? Although, maybe that was the point?)  
  
Patient as ever, Belisarius didn't give him another 'in', so Hanna had to go with what he had already. After a few quiet moments, he took a deep breath and went with-- well, it was sort of an instinct and sort of the exact opposite of that; he reached over and grabbed the zombie's hand, and held it tight.  
  
“I, uh, need to tell you some things.”  
  
He had his eyes cast down, so he could only see his partner's face from his periphery, but he saw as well as definitely _felt_ when the man gave a return squeeze to Hanna's hand.  
  
“Of course,” he said. “You know you can tell me anything.”  
  
Hanna did look up at him then, desperate to see him. His face was so... …God, but he was so much the same person as the man from his dreams, from his memories. Regardless of skin color, of the glow of his tired eyes, of the mildness of his expressions, there was virtually nothing that made this man any different from the one he knew before, not in the ways that mattered. And Hanna had known that man (boy had he _known_ him, if only just that once... not that that had anything to do with _this,_ god why was he thinking about that right now? so inappropriate), so why had he wasted so much time worrying that the zombie was going to reject him?  
  
For that matter, why had be been so worried back in the day? 'You can tell me anything.' That was just the sort of thing he'd have said all those years, all those years ago, and really meant it, and still Hanna had never got around to saying basically any of the important things. It wasn't because he didn't believe the man's words; he was just a damn coward, and neither 'version' of his partner deserved to put up with that.  
  
“I know,” Hanna said, because he did know it. “And I'm gonna. I'm, I'm done keeping secrets.”  
  
“That's good to hear,” Belisarius said softly, seeming relieved, as if he'd been waiting to hear exactly these words spill from Hanna's mouth.  
  
Hanna tensed and found himself laughing nervously. “Oh, uh, yeah? Did I, um...?”  
  
Belisarius nodded, though he looked amused. “I imagined you had a few. It was clear that you weren't telling me everything.”  
  
Hanna cringed. “Oh, well, it's, y'know, it's complicated.”  
  
“I understand,” the zombie said. “But I'd like to know, if you're willing to tell me.”  
  
It wasn't so much that Hanna was willing, but more that he _had_ to, because he was starting to feel like these secrets might be dangerous to keep, and he wasn't getting anywhere alone and honestly, the guy had been a detective, so who better to have on the case, right? And, moreover, the silence was really eating him up inside.  
  
(But really-- Belisarius _knew_ he was keeping things from him? He wasn't sure why that was surprising, given how damn clever his partner was, but it still made Hanna ridiculously nervous. What an idiot he'd been, trying to lie to that man.)  
  
Hanna sighed and tried to pry some words out of his throat. “There's a lot to say, but I don't really know where to start,” he admitted.  
  
He expected, 'Start from the beginning,' like people always seemed to say in movies, but instead the zombie said, “Start with what's most important.”  
  
That didn't take any thought at all, although Hanna knew if he let himself think about it then he would find some way to talk himself out of saying what needed to be said, so he plunged on ahead. “I know you,” he said. “I... _knew_ you.”  
  
“Before I showed up at your door?” Belisarius asked, though it seemed like he already understood the answer. He didn't look surprised to hear that Hanna had been keeping a pretty massive detail from him, and he didn't seem upset either, though it was hard to tell from his expression. He hadn't pulled his hand back from Hanna's. In fact, he'd readjusted their grip on each other when Hanna's had gone slack, so that _he_ was on top now, holding gently but firmly onto the magic user's vaguely sweaty palm.  
  
“Right,” Hanna said. “We, uh... I think I was eighteen when we met. I mean, actually eighteen. I tell people I'm twenty-four these days, but that was more like, er, when I stopped aging, I guess. Or, um, actually it was probably before that, but that's when I stopped keeping track.”  
  
Quite the opposite of Hanna's expectations, his friend didn't ask any questions then. No 'why didn't you tell me?' or 'how did we meet?'. He said, “I'm sorry I don't remember.”  
  
Hanna's gaze had drifted downward toward the empty black space of the zombie's chest (he was still wearing Hanna's t-shirt), but his eyes snapped back up to his face then. “Seriously?” he said, not much of a question. “I can't--... It's not your fault at all!” He laughed and shook his head. “If anyone-- look, it's, it's probably _my_ fault, if anyone's. I... I think I'm the one that brought you back.”  
  
“You _think_?” He raised an eyebrow, more visibly skeptical than he'd yet been this week. “But you don't know?”  
  
“Er, no,” Hanna admitted. “I don't remember doing it or anything, but... it just makes sense. I _wanted_ to, ever since you ...died.”  
  
Belisarius didn't seem convinced. “But if you didn't bring me back all that time, then why now?”  
  
Shrugging, Hanna replied honestly, “I dunno.”  
  
“Maybe you shouldn't blame yourself,” the zombie suggested. “At least until you have more evidence. And even then, is it something that requires _blame?”_  
  
“Yes,” Hanna said, sounding and feeling like a petulant child. “Because it was a bad decision. Black magic, going back on promises-- you know, the kind of stuff that's generally frowned upon.” For emphasis (and because just thinking about the situation put him in a worse mood), _he_ frowned on it, since 'society at large' wasn't here to do it for him.  
  
The zombie shrugged lightly, a half-disagreeing sort of gesture. “Even so, whether it was you or someone else, I can't say I don't appreciate it.”  
  
That made a certain amount of sense, because people generally did prefer living over not-living, even if it was only a sort of undeath. But the only reason Belisarius could say that now was because he didn't remember how he'd felt about it before. “You wouldn't be saying that if you remembered your past,” Hanna told him. “Which... actually.” He remembered rather suddenly that the zombie's memory was something he was in control of. His whole body seized for a split second at the thought of relinquishing that back to him, but he'd already decided to throw everything out there, and this was the most efficient way to get down to the bottom of maybe half of their current problems. Hanna took a steadying breath and looked his partner square in the... jaw... area, and said, “Your name was Christopher Johnson.”  
  
The man's eyes widened noticeably, although they still were a little sleepy-looking. (Getting one's memories back doesn't suddenly make one less beholden to the physical effects of being undead.) He blinked, and asked, “Really?” in a somewhat-unimpressed sort of way.  
  
That kind of response, while not out of line for the man's personality, was not quite what Hanna had been expecting. “Er... yeah,” he said. “You don't, uh, you don't remember?”  
  
“No, I don't remember anything,” Belisarius said, with a look on his face like he thought maybe Hanna was testing him. “Only what you've told me, which isn't much.”  
  
Hanna was _a little_ speechless for a moment. “Yeah, no?” he said, in response to no question that had been asked. He was trying to wrap his head around what had just not-happened. (He was still feeling a little fuzzy. Distantly, he wondered how much sleep he'd gotten.) He'd really thought the name was going to be the key to his memories. He'd been sure enough that he hadn't even bothered thinking of an alternative possibility. At this point, though, telling the man about the name-thing would be not only incriminating but unnecessary, so he didn't bother and instead forged on ahead with the reveals, hoping the pause between didn't make him seem any more like a dork than he was sure he already did.  
  
“Well, you were a detective,” Hanna said. “A really good one, actually, but you needed my help on a case once, so, uh, that's how we met.”  
  
Belisarius nodded, putting the pieces together (and probably being very unsurprised to hear of his previous vocation) and coming to a conclusion which Hanna was both scared and relieved to admit to. “And we continued working together,” the zombie guessed. “I was the partner you mentioned.”  
  
“Yeah,” Hanna said, clearing his throat when the word came out thick. “I--...” He cleared his throat again; he might have been cried-out in his dreams, but in this lifetime his head was still full of unspent tears and the mucous that went along with them.  
  
“I'm sorry,” the zombie said, when Hanna didn't seem to have any more words at the ready. “That must have been hard for you, these past few days.”  
  
“You don't know the half of it,” Hanna responded, almost unthinkingly.  
  
It looked for a moment like Belisarius was considering leaving that train of thought alone, but then he asked (almost as if his curiosity was getting the better of him), “Is it something you can tell me?”  
  
Hanna _wanted_ to tell him, to explain that it had been hard having to look at the zombie and know he didn't remember him not just because they were friends and partners, but because Hanna had absolutely loved him in the most intense of ways, but, god, it was hard enough to admit to that sort of thing _once..._ which was probably why he'd never done it. Yeah, they'd had their moment in time, and the detective had understood, Hanna was sure, but just coming right out and saying it was, clearly, just impossible.  
  
Not to mention, the man's physical condition needed to be considered... at least a little bit. He was a zombie, and there was no getting around that. Hanna didn't happen to know any magics that could turn an undead back into a regular living human, nor did he think any even existed, so his partner would be staying a zombie probably-indefinitely. Not that that really bothered Hanna, but it was something to think about. Could zombies _have_ physical romantic relationships? Could they even kiss? They didn't really have saliva, did they? (For that matter, how did they even talk?) Would Hanna even be willing to pursue a physical romance with a zombie? (He thought about it for around a second and a half. 'Yes', he decided.) Although, he didn't mind if they _didn't_. But what about Belisarius? Would he want to? Would he be creeped out by the thought?  
  
On that note, Belisarius had no reason to love him back. Not now, not yet, not when he'd only known Hanna for less than a week and all Hanna had done was lie to him that whole time. (And he knew it now.) The detective had loved him; he wouldn't try to kid himself out of that. Whether he'd deserved it or not, that was his. But love was... not something that happened that fast, at least for most people. It had taken them _years_. Well, years to figure the whole thing out, anyway. Hanna had known how he'd _felt_ within probably the first few months. (By the time he'd first used the terrible 'my cats miss you' excuse, probably, which hadn't been untrue, incidentally. They'd start whining if the man hadn't visited in too long; truly they were Hanna's kindred spirits.)  
  
Aaaand of course there was the matter of the _unprofessionalism_ of admitting that you were in love with a client, while you still hadn't solved their case. Particularly when the both of you were possibly in constant danger from some unknown source and such a thing would prove distracting at best.  
  
All-in-all, it was probably not a good idea.  
  
He went ahead and did it anyway.  
  
In the span of a second, which felt inordinately long to Hanna, he pulled his hand out from under the zombie's, reached up behind his neck, and pulled him down into a kiss. Despite how nervous he was, the gentle contact made Hanna feel infinitely better about things, at least for a minute.  
  
He pulled away before too long, hoping he hadn't already gone too far.  
  
Belisarius looked a little surprised, but not as much as Hanna expected. He hadn't returned to his upright position when Hanna let go of him, still leaning into Hanna's space, a mere six inches from his face. He looked at him with those lidded glowing eyes, concern building up as he put all the pieces together.  
  
“I think I understand,” he said, and closed the short space between them not to kiss Hanna but to lay his cheek on his and pull him into a soft embrace. “I wish you had told me sooner.”  
  
Hanna laughed, and returned the hug, winding his arms around his partner's back and holding far tighter than was probably polite. “Of all the things, _that's_ what you care about?”  
  
From the feel of it, the zombie made a sort of nodding gesture. “It explains a lot,” he said. “Why I was drawn to you. Why I came to you to begin with.”  
  
“Yeah, I _wish_ that was it. I'm still not totally convinced,” Hanna admitted. He couldn't deny the possibility that there was foul-play involved, if only because 'his old partner tracking him down because _he loved him but he just didn't know it_ ,' was kind of too cutesy to be true. Another thought came to him and he smiled to himself as he said it because it was so patently self-depreciating in an unconvincing way. “And I never said how _you_ felt about _me_.”  
  
Belisarius leaned back enough that he could look Hanna in the face, and Hanna was not terribly surprised to see that the man was honestly laughing-- a very modest and subdued laughter, like everything he did, but laughter all the same. “I don't need you to tell me how I feel,” he said. “It's only memories I need help with.”  
  
That wasn't something Hanna had really expected to hear; not that hearing the zombie _felt that way_ about him was really all that surprising (not after the last minute or two), but his wording implied that he had felt like that for a while? That maybe he had woken up already knowing that he loved Hanna even if he didn't know who Hanna was? Well that was a little far-fetched, but it seemed like something along those lines. Belisarius definitely didn't look surprised to have suddenly realized how he felt or anything. He looked about as comfortable with the thought as Hanna was (or maybe more; Hanna had had so long to think about his feelings that he'd worried them into some uncomfortable state he'd probably never get them out of).  
  
But that wasn't really important. They were doing something here, and that something was trying to impart upon the zombie his lost memories. “What else do you wanna know?” Hanna asked, really trying to push aside the idea that he could kiss his partner probably any time now if he wanted to and it would be okay, because he was still just _right there_ , right inside Hanna's personal-space bubble, even if he had backed off a bit from the hug and was now just sitting real close next to him. (Huh, they were holding hands again-- when had that happened?)  
  
“I suppose you should tell me anything that is relevant to the case,” he suggested, and Hanna was (as usual) astounded that the man was so damn good at compartmentalizing that he could just get back to business after having a mushy love confession. He didn't even look like he was struggling with it like Hanna most certainly was. (And Hanna had had a lot more time to practice too.)  
  
There were only a few things that were really important to the case, and they'd gone over most of them already. #1: Hanna had a past as a necromancer. #2: He and the zombie knew each other. #3: They were romantically involved. (Okay, so maybe that wasn't technically essential to the investigation, but he kinda felt like it was. Either way, Hanna was really glad to have it off his chest.)  
  
So after those things, there was really only one bullet-point left, wasn't there? Hanna absolutely did not want to talk about it, but he couldn't escape the fact that #4 was: Hanna fucked up and got his partner killed. He was pretty sure he was breaking out into a cold sweat already at the thought of having to tell Belisarius what had happened. The man already had a lot of the pieces of that particular puzzle, but Hanna wasn't all that eager to help him put them together.  
  
“Uh, well, I think I told you some of it before,” he said, because totally clamming up wasn't an option.  
  
“I remember,” the zombie said. “You blamed yourself for my death. You said you betrayed your partner's trust and that led to him being killed.”  
  
Hanna shivered, and said faintly, “yeah.”  
  
Belisarius squeezed Hanna's hand, though Hanna barely registered it. “You also said that your intentions were good.” This he phrased as a question.  
  
“I guess,” Hanna answered, though he'd hardly heard the question. He just kept thinking about his dream. He thought he'd just about put it out of his head, but now it was seeping back in, like a heavy cold fog, the memories fading in to cover over what he was seeing with his own two eyes. He could just about swear he could feel the blood dripping out of the heavy wound in his chest, more blood coating his palms and fingers. The detective's hand was cold...  
  
“Then perhaps you shouldn't blame yourself.”  
  
That _sounded_ nice, Hanna thought, but it didn't make any sense. “I broke a promise,” he said, gazing down sadly at the detective's body. “I said I wouldn't use necromancy anymore, and I did it anyway. And then I...” A tremor ran through his arm, down to his hand, where a phantom pain lived, snaking its way through his veins and muscles and stabbing through his fingertips.  
  
He floated there for a while, not really anchored despite the hand he was holding. God, what an idiot he'd been. What a selfish idiot, so easily manipulated by the darkness. And now his best friend was dead because of it. He felt sick. A terrible gross shiver ran throughout his body. He held tighter to the detective's hand and squeezed his eyes shut.  
  
“Hanna? Are you alright? You don't look well.”  
  
He startled as he felt a cold hand on the side of his face, turning his head, and for one crazy moment he hoped to God it wasn't that demon again. He could just imagine it, red eyes in a face full of melting black tar and sharp rotten teeth, despite the fact that it had only ever looked like people he'd known. But he could see it now, reaching for him, pulling at his mouth, stretching his jaw open and climbing inside where it could sink its claws into his brain and make him a marionette.  
  
But the fear drained out of him when he heard the soft murmuring voice of his partner. The demon had whispered at him, but never in such a calming way. He didn't think it _could_ , didn't think it had the capacity for genuine pleasantness. So he opened his eyes.  
  
“Is something wrong?” the zombie asked.  
  
A wave of relief washed through Hanna, a strong warm feeling that soon turned to exhaustion. He didn't answer; he just sighed and melted a little bit into Belisarius' hands (one at his face, the other still holding his).  
  
The zombie readjusted his hold on Hanna's head and moved him so that he was leaning against the man's chest, a sight more comfortable than slumping forward on his face. “Maybe you should go back to sleep,” he suggested. “I think you might be ill.”  
  
No, Hanna wasn't sick, he didn't think, since he really never got sick, not in the traditional way or meaning. But he certainly didn't feel well either. He breathed a deep, sort of shaky breath against the soft cotton of the zombie's t-shirt. Here was a place he thought he could sleep, a place he'd wanted to sleep practically forever and somehow never managed to. But he couldn't sleep right now. Weren't they having an important conversation? True, he didn't want to say what came next, but God, he'd gotten this far.  
  
And... he vaguely dreaded going back to that dream world. There was nothing good left there, only a meandering sadness.  
  
“I believe you need more rest,” Belisarius said to the silence of Hanna's non-answers. He moved off the couch and picked Hanna up in one smooth motion, carrying him in a nostalgic sort of way he only ever had when Hanna had not been taking care of himself properly. “It's still evening,” he added. “You only slept for a short while before.”  
  
This was not so bad, Hanna thought. Quite the opposite, really, being carried like this. He could almost swear he heard the man's heart beating, but it was probably the ghost of it echoing off what was left of his own. Still, though, he didn't want to sleep. He didn't want to be put down on his bed and watch his partner walk away, pause at the door with his hand up on the frame and gaze back at him like he had something he wanted to say. He didn't want to be left alone in this quiet cold room in this terrible apartment until he drifted off, then find himself alone again wandering the city streets in the shadows and gently wishing he had died. That was what came next. He'd lived it for years already; there was no reason to revisit it. The other dreams had not been so bad in comparison; at least there'd been the detective. But there was nothing worth remembering in those long middle years.  
  
As expected, he was laid down on the bed, with the utmost of care. But then the zombie sat down there, and situated himself so that his top half was draped across the small empty space not taken up by Hanna's body, so close that Hanna's head butted up against the man's neck when he curled forward.  
  
“Is this alright?” he asked Hanna, and Hanna responded, for want of better words, “yeah.”  
  
If he'd been human (or alive, anyway), Belisarius might have sighed then with the relief that he'd gotten Hanna to do what he wanted without too much effort. As it was, his body relaxed a little, which had sort of a calming effect on the stressed-out magic user. _He did_ sigh, and felt the tension drain out of him as the two of them settled in together. Even if he did fall back into that dream world, he reminded himself, it was still just a dream, just a memory. It had no bearing on how his life was anymore. When he woke up, he would be here-- which was not exactly a perfect place to be, but about as close as he was expecting to get. This was his home, and it was the place he would always return to, no matter how long the dream seemed to be.  
  
Of course that was mostly just what he told himself because he thought returning to those dreams might be inevitable at this point, but it was all true, at least.  
  
Hanna didn't quite _startle_ out of his thoughts, because that would imply some sort of energy he wasn't feeling, but his consciousness was dragged back a little when he felt the zombie's arm come around to rest at his back. “I don't know if you will sleep,” he said, “but I hope you can get some rest like this. I'd like to continue our conversation in the morning, if you're feeling better.”  
  
Between returning to the dream world and 'fessing up to his partner that he'd killed him _literally with his own two hands,_ Hanna wasn't sure which he dreaded more. Unfortunately, he got the feeling that he'd be doing both before long, and he couldn't even be all that upset about it because, a. he really was darn tired, and b. he kinda figured he deserved having to deal with whatever kind of crap like this came his way. So he told the man, “sure.”  
  
And then he pretty much fell asleep.  
  
It didn't happen just like that, but he dropped pretty quickly back into the haze he'd been feeling and after that he didn't really remember anything which, in his experience, was typically how falling asleep tended to go.  
  
When he woke up, it was sunny. A beam of morning light fell on his face, which managed to be both an annoying and pleasant way to greet the day. He realized he hadn't felt this sensation since he was a kid, which was the last time he'd had an east-facing window in his bedroom. He turned away from the ridiculously bright light, of course, but it was nice.  
  
Even nicer, however, was what he turned _to_. It was a soft, warm body with the familiar smell of his partner. (And no it wasn't weird that he could recognize him by smell, as much as he scoffed at that kind of thing in romance novels. When you'd been with someone that long, it made sense that you became accustomed to their particular scent. (And it wasn't like he was picking out delicate hints of almond, cast-iron, and office paper, because that _would_ be ridiculous.)) He didn't open his eyes, but Hanna knew who it was as surely as he knew... anything else in his life. Surely-er, in fact, because there wasn't a whole lot in his life which he was totally sure about, he'd admit.)  
  
Hanna's movement seemed to wake the detective, who snuggled closer and draped an arm across Hanna's waist. “G'morning,” he murmured sleepily, breathing deeply where his face was buried in Hanna's hair and causing Hanna to shiver from the sudden cool and warm of his inhale and exhale.  
  
“Morning,” Hanna said cheerily, though still a bit thick. “Sleep well?”  
  
“How could I not?” the man responded, and it was just so perfectly corny that Hanna finally had to open his eyes and look at him, leaning back so he could see more than just his chest.  
  
He looked well-rested, comfortable, like he'd just had the best damn sleep of his life. Hanna felt the same... but then, on the other hand, he also felt extremely tired still, which he figured just meant his body was trying to convince him to stay in bed a little longer.  
  
“If it was such a great rest, I guess you won't mind getting a little more?” he asked, grinning.  
  
The detective (or whatever Hanna was calling him these days; he couldn't quite remember) returned the expression, though it seemed a little more mischievous. He found Hanna's hand under the thick quilt and held it, weaving their fingers together. “I don't know,” he replied. “I think I've had enough rest, but I don't know that I'm ready to get out of bed just yet.”  
  
They stayed in bed for quite a while and had a really great morning.  
  
Somehow, it was _still_ morning when they did finally remove themselves from their nest of blankets and sheets (and pillows! Quite a few pillows). They stumbled to the bathroom to get on with their regular morning routine, the both of them stepping around each other in the small (but not tiny) bathroom, easy, like it was a dance they'd practiced so many times before.  
  
On the way to the shower, Hanna stopped in front of the mirror. He'd already gotten rid of his shirt (long ago, if he'd had one to start with), and he had a short moment of surprise when he saw himself. A shudder ran down him, but he couldn't for the life of him figure out why. The tile was a little chilly, he supposed. He looked closer, but there was nothing wrong with his reflection. He was whole and looked pretty much as he always had-- short, pale, messy red hair, with a small indentation on the bridge of his nose, where his glasses sat when they weren't being forgotten on bedside tables or wherever the detective had carefully set them when he fell asleep with them on (or when they started making out). Nothing out of the ordinary.  
  
“Something wrong?” the detective asked, as he stripped off what was left of his own clothes.  
  
“N-no, nothing,” Hanna said, unsure why he'd stuttered over it. He looked then at the detective, following him with his eyes as the man went to turn on the shower faucet. He had such a nice body, and Hanna didn't mean that only in a sexual or even aesthetic way; his body really was very _good_ , with long lean muscles, even coloring, and smooth unmarred skin.  
  
Or he'd thought the man's skin was unmarred, but when he stood up straight to adjust the shower head Hanna noticed several thin streams of blood dripping down his back.  
  
“Woah, geez, you're bleeding,” Hanna said. “What happened?” He reached forward instinctively with his right hand, but the detective turned.  
  
“What are you talking about?” he asked, following Hanna's gaze over his shoulder and reaching back to investigate himself. “I don't feel anything.”  
  
Hanna came around to double-check and was shocked to find his partner's back as perfect as it had always been. “Oh,” he said faintly. “Uh, never mind. I guess I was seeing things.”  
  
The detective shrugged it off, Hanna making an effort to do the same, and they stepped into the shower's spray. They took their time washing hair and bodies (you could take longer showers if you shared, after all), and Hanna tried not to stare at the man's back where he'd sworn he'd seen bright streaks of red. He focused instead on cleaning himself, but a feeling of nausea struck when he got to his chest, so he skimmed over it.  
  
After they were freshly washed and dried and dressed, they went out into the kitchen, where the detective began to rummage around in the refrigerator for, presumably, breakfast ingredients, while Hanna found himself going to the cupboard for a can of cat food. He divided it onto two plates without thinking much about it, except that he couldn't quite remember _buying_ cat food. Maybe the detective had done it on his way home from work, he thought. He put the plates down by a bowl of water and called for Sith and Sabo, but they didn't seem to be around. Off catching mice, Hanna figured, although he could hardly imagine there being many mice around here.  
  
Really, the apartment was so clean and bright, it didn't look like there'd be any vermin at all. Hanna wandered over to the mantle of the fireplace ('since when did apartments have fireplaces?' some wispy thought in the back of his brain asked) and ran his hand over the top of it. No dust whatsoever. In the corner, no cobwebs. Even the rug by the plush couch was (as far as he could tell without kneeling) entirely devoid of crumbs or bits of dried grass or dirt.  
  
“This place is spotless,” Hanna muttered, appreciative, but a little shocked. He returned to the kitchen and peered around his partner at the stove, where fresh blueberry pancakes were grilling. “You really are the best roommate ever, you know that? What would I do without you?”  
  
The detective looked over his shoulder with a small smirk and responded flatly, “die”, before returning his attention to breakfast.  
  
Hanna's heart skipped a beat, in a really unpleasant way, but he laughed anyway. Obviously the man was joking, but it was more the sort of joke _Hanna_ would have made (probably had made before) than the type of thing _he_ would normally say. And, beyond that, Hanna had kind of thought it looked like the man's eyes had flashed for a moment, orange, or maybe red.  
  
Then again, it was likely Hanna was just seeing things today. Maybe he needed to get his eyes checked. It had been... a while.  
  
That kernel of unease was still nestled in his chest, but he tried to ignore it as they ate. The food was good enough to be appropriately distracting, at least until they finished and began the process of cleaning up. The detective hurried through it, not rushed but not casual either.  
  
“I've got to go,” he said, pecking Hanna on the cheek then standing straight to readjust his clothes. “It's a short shift, so I should be home for dinner.”  
  
“Oh. Okay,” Hanna said, disappointed. For some reason, he had thought the two of them were going to spend the day together. He hadn't expected the man would have to go and leave him here all by himself. But he supposed if his partner had to leave then he ought to be gracious about it. “Have a good day. I l-- uh, I'll see you later.”  
  
The detective nodded, smiling as he left the apartment and closed the door behind him. Hanna stared after him for a good minute, wondering why he felt so sad and why “I love you” had seemed so close to coming out of his mouth only to change its mind partway.  
  
The day went by in a blur, during which he couldn't remember doing anything, but by the time his partner returned (looking tired, but less-so than expected) Hanna's sadness had entirely disappeared. And it wasn't even that he'd just become more cheerful at seeing the detective, but that he'd just forgotten to be sad somewhere along the line of the hours that has apparently passed since the man had left.  
  
“How was work?” Hanna asked, standing right where he'd been that morning.  
  
“Fine,” the detective responded. He loosened his tie and scrubbed a hand through his previously-neat hair, the obvious prerequisites to having a comfortable evening. “It was a slow day. What did you do today?”  
  
Hanna shrugged. “Nothing much,” he said, wondering at it himself. He looked around the apartment, but nothing looked like it'd been moved at all. Even the cats' food bowls were still full. (He figured he should clean those up before they started going bad, but he didn't want to do it right then, so he didn't.)  
  
There wasn't much to say to that, so the detective didn't. Instead he asked, “Do you want to go out for dinner?”  
  
Part of Hanna protested because, y'know, money, and they'd just eaten out the other day, hadn't they? But he agreed, and happily, because going out sounded... nice. And since his partner did most of the cooking, it wasn't like he could really say, 'no I think we should stay home and you should make dinner after working all day'. So they left the apartment and took a leisurely stroll down the road toward their dinner options.  
  
Though he couldn't quite figure out why, Hanna was surprised when the detective reached down to grab his hand while they walked. He held it firmly, with what felt like practice rather than passion, and Hanna's heart fluttered like it was some crazy risk or adventure, even though people held hands all the time. Just looking around at other couples on the street, he could see at least three of them attached in similar ways. Reassured, he held on a little tighter, though something about it still made him a bit anxious.  
  
Dinner was really nice. They sat outside on the patio of their chosen restaurant, surrounded by gleaming torches and strings of fairy lights, and had a meal that felt totally opulent, with appetizers and fancy drinks, and a rich chocolaty dessert. Or... no, it was pie, a fruit pie. But it was all very good, and there would be plenty enough to take home a couple boxes of leftovers.  
  
“This is kind of expensive though, isn't it?” Hanna asked, aware that eating out at a place like this probably cost about the same as at least a year's worth of groceries. But that calculation seemed a little off. He decided he meant a week instead.  
  
“It is,” the detective replied. “But I got that promotion I was working towards, so we can afford it.”  
  
Hanna was pleasantly surprised. He was sure that the assholes his partner worked with were never going to realize the man's potential and they'd be scraping by on his simple wages (and whatever it was Hanna did for a living) for the rest of their lives. “Finally. Congratulations. What did you have to do?” he asked, laughing. “Sell your soul?”  
  
The detective shrugged and went back to picking through his meal.  
  
Though that wasn't exactly an assuring answer, Hanna payed it little mind. He sipped his drink (he wasn't sure what it was, but it tasted classy) and let his eyes wander, looking at the other people around them as he and the detective chatted casually.  
  
“If you could have anything right now, what would it be?” his partner asked, punctuating the question by touching their feet together under the table.  
  
“That's easy,” Hanna said, grinning, before he realized that he actually couldn't think of what he'd been going to say. It had been right on the tip of his tongue, something _so obvious_ , but now it was gone. He looked at the detective sitting across from him and felt very strongly that what he wanted was _him_... but he already _had him_ , so that didn't make any sense. And he had, really, everything else he could possibly need as well, including a beautiful apartment and plenty enough food to eat. So he reached across the table to grab his partner's hand and said, “There's nothing else I want right now.” (It was so cheesy it could fill a fondue pot, but it was true.) “What about you?” he asked.  
  
The detective gave it a moment of thought, and then said, “Closure.”  
  
Hanna raised an eyebrow. He didn't understand. “What do you mean?”  
  
But his partner didn't answer or clarify, ignoring Hanna as if he hadn't heard him at all. The man carried on with the evening, so Hanna followed suit.  
  
After a while, they packed all their leftovers into styrofoam boxes and left the restaurant. Hanna didn't look at the bill, but he didn't really want to. He thought it might just increase the weird feeling of anxiety gnawing at his gut. But it was a nice night-- warm and clear, just perfect for a walk-- so the awkward feeling in his stomach faded when he stopped thinking about it. He walked hand in hand with his... well, he wasn't sure. What were they after all? Boyfriends? Fiances? They weren't married, he didn't think (though he looked at his hands for a ring, just to be sure; he didn't find anything), but 'partners' sometimes felt like too vague a term. 'Partners' could mean just about anything, so sure it was great when you didn't want to be too open about your relationship, but Hanna was finding that he wanted more than that.  
  
Whatever the case, it was a nice night, and he was walking down the road, holding hands with the person he lo-- really liked a whole lot. He forgot about the anxiety, because there was nothing to be anxious about when things were going this well.  
  
At the edge of the restaurant quarter though, while they were passing the last diners and cafes before returning to the cluster of apartments, someone reached out and grabbed Hanna's arm, yanking him out of the detective's hand.  
  
“Woah, what the heck?” Instinctively, Hanna reached into his pocket with his free hand, and experienced a split second of panic when he found nothing there with which to defend himself, until he saw the man who belonged to the arm that had stopped him.  
  
“What are you doin' here, Hannuh?” Worth asked, sounding a little more accusatory than you'd typically expect from a friend you met on the street. He let go of Hanna's arm and crossed his own, adopting a rather judgmental stance. “Ain't you got work to do?”  
  
It was nice to see Worth, but Hanna thought he could do without the mother-henning right now. “What. I just went out for something to eat. Am I not allowed to eat?”  
  
From behind Worth came Ples (and Hanna then realized that his friends must have all been out together, because sitting at a table a few feet away were Conrad and Lamont, as well as Veser and Toni. He was only a little miffed that they hadn't invited him). “No, he's right, Hanna,” Ples said. “You should be focusing on your goal. Now is not the time for distractions.”  
  
Hanna scoffed. “Y'know, I'm doing my best! I just... uh...”  
  
_'I just what?'_ he wondered, unsure what he'd been planning to say or what on earth his friends were talking about.  
  
“Uh, look, I'm on a date, okay?” he said, taking a step backwards and nearly stumbling off the curb. “I'll talk to you guys later.”  
  
Ples shook his head reprovingly. “You may not have the chance,” he said, but neither he nor Worth reached out to stop Hanna as he turned and jogged down the street toward the detective, who had continued on without him as if nothing had happened at all. The man didn't mention Hanna's stop to chat, so Hanna didn't bring it up either. And he didn't look back over his shoulder as they walked on, feeling like his friends would either be still staring after him or have disappeared, and not wanting either image to haunt his mind.  
  
Before long, they were home in their lovely clean apartment, having apparently walked some ways through some amount of city and apartment foyer and stairwell, though Hanna couldn't recall it. Being back in a space he was familiar with left him feeling much safer-- in contrast to an emotion he hadn't realized he'd been feeling while they were out. He could feel the unease draining out of him now, a sense of confidence and control replacing it.  
  
Emboldened by this unexpected spike in his mood, Hanna grabbed the detective by the shoulder and leaned up to kiss him. “Thanks for dinner,” he said. “It was nice to go out like that. But, uh, it's nice to come home too.” He gave his partner a look that he hoped was just shy of lascivious.  
  
“Is it?” the man asked, raising an eyebrow and a corner of his lips. “I suppose we'll have to do it more often, then.” He looped his long arms around Hanna, resting his hands at the small of his back, which the tall man could only reach because they were still pressed quite close together.  
  
That was something Hanna could totally get behind because, of course, food was great, and then... moments like this were what made life worth living, he sometimes thought. “Yeah,” he replied, kind of running out of words to match the depth of emotion he was feeling, to be here warm in the arms of someone he cared about so strongly, although a few phrases did come to him as the feeling reminded him what he'd kept thinking all day. “I really... wanna stay like this forever,” he said quietly. “With you, I mean.”  
  
The detective pulled him even closer, near enough to him to really feel his warmth and hear his heart beat. “I do too,” the man said, dropping his head to rest on Hanna's.  
  
“Will you?” Hanna asked, despite it seeming like an unnecessary question at this point. He didn't know why he asked it. If the detective _wanted_ to stay, then why _wouldn't_ he stay? What was going to stop him? It was a silly thing to ask.  
  
Nuzzling into Hanna's hair, the detective replied, “Of course I'll stay.”  
  
The emotion that flooded Hanna he thought was relief, so strong it was painful. To hear that his partner would stay was the only thing he wanted out of life. “Thank god,” he said. “I don't know what I'd do without you. I'm so happy to hear you say that; so happy it hurts.” He leaned in further, his head against the detective's chest. Intense feelings were bursting inside of Hanna right now, but the detective was so calm that he couldn't even hear the man's heart beating.  
  
The detective held him closer, stroking gently down his back. “That's not happiness,” he said from somewhere above Hanna's head.  
  
“What?”  
  
“You're not crying because you're happy,” the detective told him, releasing his hold on Hanna. They backed up slightly from each other, and Hanna reached up to feel his face, finally realizing that he _was_ crying. His partner was blurry in his vision, but he could still see that the man shook his head as he said, “It's because you know things have to end.”  
  
Hanna pushed his glasses up onto his forehead, blinked hard and rubbed at his eyes. He didn't want to admit that he understood what the detective was saying, but it was suddenly very clear to him that this painful emotion really _wasn't_ joy. It was... it was anything but. It was terrible, and it reminded him of a type of manipulation he'd felt before, even if he couldn't quite place it, some time in his past when he'd been made to feel happy when everything was going wrong.  
  
When his sight was clear he looked up again at his partner, the man who had always been a beacon to look to when things were dark. But now his eyes had begun to glow, not a warm or inviting color, but a dangerous shade of red, and the skin around them grew darker, a sickly color like shadows cast already in darkness. The rest of his flesh darkened in patches as if burning from the inside, rotting away as Hanna watched. Even the clean white of their surroundings dulled to a lifeless grey and all the warmth Hanna had been feeling, maybe all he'd ever felt, dissolved, leaving his insides like ice.  
  
His skin continued to turn, to rot away until the meat and bones beneath began to show, everything a faded decaying color, as if the flesh had been dead for years and long-since forgotten the vibrant colors of life. The man said nothing as he melted away, still and silent as a statue.  
  
Unable to watch, Hanna dropped to his knees and covered his face in a rush of childish instinct, as if maybe by not seeing it he could cause it to not be there at all. Such a tactic had never worked before, but when he peered out between his fingers a few moments later he found that the scene had changed. The first thing he noticed was that his hands were covered in dirt, wet deep-brown soil like which hadn't seen sun in years. An exhumed grave lay just before him, and without thinking he reached out over the corpse and recited the well-known incantation to bring it back to the world of the living.  
  
He watched in fascination as his partner opened his glowing orange eyes for the first time.  
  
“God...” Hanna thought but did not say, clearly not in control of this body. “This isn't a dream, is it? I really did do this. It really was me.”  
  
His memory-self hovered still over the zombie, as if wanting to touch him but unsure. Hanna couldn't tell what the mind currently in control of his body was thinking, if he was thinking anything. How had he let himself do this? And why did he block it out? He wished he knew.  
  
It took a moment for the zombie to come around, for his eyes to adjust to seeing and his self to adjust to _being_ again. But then his gaze came upon the necromancer (he wondered what expression was on his memory-self's face) and a flurry of emotions went through him, evident despite the relative stillness of his new face.  
  
“Hanna...” he said, the simple word full to the brim with unspoken thoughts. For the most part, Hanna understood them. There was a sense of joy at seeing him again, a gladness that the magic-user was alive and maybe well, a sadness at the situation, which the detective had grasped quite quickly, and... worry. The man began to sit up from his grave, and when he reached out towards him, Hanna flinched back.  
  
And when he opened his eyes again, he was home.  
  
The dreams had been convincing while he'd been in them, but now that he was back in the waking world, it was clear there was no comparison. This world was much more sensory, and far less reliant on his emotions. He could smell and hear things that had no purpose in the narrative of his dream, like the slight mustiness of his mattress and the just-audible quarreling of the neighbors. It was very imperfect, so he knew it was real.  
  
He was exhausted. That dream had really taken it out of him, far more than any of the other dream-memories he'd had that week. Those had been... almost pleasant. Or, _entirely_ pleasant, in some of the cases. Regardless, they'd definitely been more predictable and less unsettling than these.  
  
God. Had he...? Yeah, it seemed that he had. The part of him that really liked living in denial denied the veracity of the vision. It had come after a dream; wasn't it just a dream itself? Something his confused and guilty mind conjured?  
  
It wasn't, though. It certainly wasn't exactly right either, not a memory in the traditional sense of the word because he still couldn't remember it, but not a dream. Something repressed from the back of his mind that he could only see when he was asleep. (Hanna was pretty sure it was magic, but it was just as likely to be equal parts spell and psychology. Now _there_ was a strange sort of enchantment he'd never quite understand.)  
  
It was obvious now that he had to tell Belisarius everything. Really _everything_. If he had forgotten, or... or repressed not just bringing someone back to life, but bringing _him_ back to life, and apparently manipulating his memories? (He'd _known_ Hanna, recognized him in that memory-dream. He'd understood everything-- you could see it in his eyes. But what? Hanna had freaked out and... erased his memories? Locked them in some way even he didn't understand?) Hanna couldn't trust himself. But he could trust his partner. That was easy enough to decide.  
  
He sat up and rubbed roughly at his face, then reached out and patted around on the ground around him for his glasses which luckily had been left less than an arm's length from him. He was alone in the somewhat-dark room. There was no orange glow of the zombie's stare, and even through the tiny window the moonlight was so bright he could see that there were no other humanoid shapes around. Hanna couldn't blame the man for having gotten up and wandered off after he fell asleep, much as he'd have liked to wake up next to him. It would have made the surreal horror of the dream more bearable. But laying still the whole night when you couldn't sleep was less than an ideal use of time, so it seemed likely to Hanna that he'd find his partner out in the living room, probably getting lost in Wikipedia again.  
  
But the lights were off in the rest of the apartment as well, and the laptop sat where they'd left it earlier that night, open but powered down. Actually, when Hanna went to flip a light switch, he found that the power was out, which was definitely a good explanation for why Belisarius was not researching the mysteries of the universe on the internet. (Even if the laptop's battery was much good (and he didn't know if it was; he never really used it without it being plugged in), the neighbors' power was probably out too, meaning the router or whatever-it-was would be down.) But if he was not in the bedroom, and he was not in the living room, or the attached kitchen, or the bathroom which Hanna had passed on his way out here, then... where _was_ the zombie?  
  
“B-... Belisarius?” Hanna called, a little warily. He couldn't see especially well in the somewhat-dark of the bedroom or the mostly-dark of the corners of the apartment furthest from the tiny window's light, even after calling up the little red flame to his hand, so he walked carefully around the small space, following the wall and training his eyes on all the spots a human-sized-and-shaped body might be hiding. The man was not in the far corner of the living room; he was not on the couch; he was not in the shower; he was not under the kitchen table; and he was not in the tight space beside the cabinets where Hanna might store a vacuum if he had one. And there was just about literally nowhere else he could be in this apartment.  
  
He'd ended up beside the front door, in the little square of mismatched wood flooring that served as a foyer, and he turned slowly to contemplate the door. The zombie _could_ have left. Hanna had not forbid him from doing so, or even casually requested that he stay inside. And the door was runed shut, but only from the outside. Maybe he'd... gone out? and was now locked in the hallway?  
  
Hanna opened the door quickly and looked around the corridor, but it was empty. And it was dark too, except for the eerie red glow of the emergency exit signs-- an unexpectedly professional provision, given that the rest of the complex was drastically out of date and very likely not up to code. But leave it to Mrs. Blaney to install only the most unsettling of safety features; forget fire-sprinklers or fixing the treacherous loose stair-steps that someone almost broke their neck on every week.  
  
The ominous light of the signs really was quite creepy though.  
  
Hanna ducked back inside and closed the door. A shiver ran through him, hot and gross. The uncanny feeling from his first dream had come back, but not masked by pleasant lies this time.  
  
Where had the zombie gone? Where was his partner? For a moment, he was finding it impossible to think straight, overcome with an inarticulate sense of fear. Had... had maybe Hanna witnessed him leave and somehow repressed the memory, like he had with reanimating him? The idea that such a thing could happen at any moment and he'd never know it-- well that was probably the worst thing to have come from the dreams. He didn't feel better knowing the truth, even though he knew he should.  
  
_'I can't just sit around and wait for him to come back,'_ Hanna thought, sitting down in his partner's spot on the couch, as if that might help him figure out where he might have gone. Really, he _could_ perfectly well wait for his return, but it seemed likely that the anxiety would eat him up in the mean time.  
  
_'I'll wait a few more minutes,'_ he told himself. _'In case he does come back. In case he just... went for a stroll. I mean, that sounds like something he would do.'_  
  
But the minutes came and went, during which time Hanna tried to resist the torture his brain was putting him through, and the zombie did not come home.  
  
“Okay,” Hanna said aloud, breaking the oppressive silence with his less-than-steady voice.. “Let's find out where he went, then.”  
  
He moved to the kitchen and rummaged around in the cabinets for the ingredients he needed, narrating each step to himself like the noise would somehow make the darkness less dangerous, cause the monsters to stay away. Of course no monsters attacked him while he searched, but he did bruise his hands and head against the unforgiving cupboards as he reached blindly around for things he was only mostly sure he'd left in them.  
  
He took his disorganized armful of ingredients and tools back to the bedroom and sat down in the only patch of light in the entire apartment. The glow of the moon was just enough for Hanna to read by as he sorted through ziploc bags, plastic containers, and the odd glass jar. From the mess he pulled a bright red string, an empty bottle, and a jar of purified water. Tap water would have done just fine, probably, but Hanna didn't want to take chances. It was hardly even a conscious decision, to be that thorough.  
  
After scrawling a few runes on the side of the bottle, Hanna poured the water carefully into it and held it up to his face, concentrating. The water swirled sleepily around the bottle for a few moments before ribbons of images began to weave themselves into discernible pictures. At first, Hanna was only looking through the bottle at himself, gazing down like a ghost floating above his own body, but then the image changed and focused instead upon the zombie. He was not in the apartment, or anywhere else Hanna was familiar with. He seemed to be unconscious, slumped on a stone or concrete floor somewhere and leaning crookedly against a short wall. A fence? A counter? It was hard to tell what the background was supposed to be, shrouded as it was in darkness. A sliver of pale light fell across the floor at the man's feet, but it did little to illuminate the situation.  
  
A pinprick of vindication jolted through Hanna, to find that he was right to be worried. What the hell was Belisarius doing there? Wherever that was. He didn't look... good. Hanna had never know a zombie to become unconscious. The man obviously didn't need to sleep either, so...  
  
Thinking about it, worrying about it, wasn't going to get him anywhere, so Hanna tried not to. He did his best to clear his mind and took a deep breath to focus. Maybe the zombie was in danger; maybe he was past the point of saving; but there was no way to know until he got to him. So he took the red string and dipped it into the swirling waters. The current pulled it down until just the edge of it remained floating, rotating counter-clockwise for a few passes until it came to rest, pointing steadily in one direction.  
  
Fighting against the instinct to run out of the apartment and follow the thread immediately, Hanna gathered as many ingredients as his pockets could hold and scribbled a few small protective runes on the undersides of his arms and wrists. Then, he took a deliberate moment just to think.  
  
He didn't know where he was going. He didn't know what he was going to find when he got there. But he needed to save the one person in the world that really mattered to him, and make up for his past failures. There was still a hell of a lot of apologizing that he needed to do. What would he have to do before he had that opportunity again? He wasn't sure. But whatever it was, he was--  
  
\--well, not _prepared_ , that was for sure. But willing, to do whatever it took. That had to count for something, right?  
  
He took another deep breath, and briefly appreciated the ability to do so, and then picked up the water bottle and followed the string out into the continuing darkness.

 


	13. Chapter 13

The city was dark but for the glow of the moon, which loomed full above them and illuminated the streets just enough to make the alleyways seem endless. Hanna thought about drawing up a light source of some sort, but he didn't want to call attention to himself by becoming a beacon. He could see other little lights here and there, the glows of cell phones and lighters, pinpricks of cigarettes and beams of flashlights, and the occasional shop with a back-up generator-- but most of the city was out of sight, tucked away safely in their homes. Only people like him lacked the sense to stay inside on a night like this.   
  
The red string floating still in the swirling water led him on, and Hanna stuttered along on its path, both rushing to get there and halting to check that nobody had followed him. He had the nasty feeling that eyes were upon him. Maybe it was only ambient spirits, drawn to the peculiar dark and quiet under the full moon, but he couldn't help thinking it was something more nefarious. Something stronger.   
  
As he continued, Hanna noticed that the invisible trail was taking him carefully away from his usual haunts, no closer to any one source of potential help than any other, which effectively dissuaded him from detouring to ask for assistance. But who would he ask, anyway? Who could help him, when he didn't know for sure what the problem was, even if they were willing to endanger themselves just to save Hanna's undead friend? It didn't matter. He didn't have the time. _Anything_ could be happening to Alexander while he wasn't there to protect him.   
  
And besides... Thinking about the things he needed to say to the man, well, he wasn't sure he wanted anybody else to witness that.   
  
It was still dark ( _'what time is it anyhow?'_ Hanna wondered) when he came upon the spell's final resting place: fittingly, a cemetery. The stiffness fell out of the red string and it swirled about as the water lost its silvery touch, the distorted picture fading from it entirely. The wide-open layout and scarcity of tall buildings caused the sprawling park to be absolutely bathed in bright white moonlight. It reflected off the shiny new tombstones dotted here and there amid the older, duller ones, and cast heavy shadows under the tall drooping trees that lined the main path.   
  
“This place is huge,” Hanna said quietly to himself, wondering for a moment how he'd never come here before, until, of course, he remembered that he'd had very little reason to frequent graveyards in the past century, however much time he'd spent in them before.   
  
The red string had led him easily enough to the cemetery, but it had failed to be any more specific than that. Hanna held up the bottle and peered through the transparent plastic, but the waters had nothing more to show him. The picture from before, though... it had shown the zombie leaning against a sleek stone wall. If that was here, it had to be a mausoleum. There were a few of the small marble buildings that he could see, so he started off towards the largest one, an ornate black box right in the middle of the park. (He did his best not to trample any graves on the way.)   
  
To his surprise, the mausoleum was empty when he got there. Locked, too, but he'd peered in through the little grated window and seen no one was inside. It was strange, he thought, because supernatural nonsense like this almost always followed along a strict unspoken guideline that tended to dictate a sort of grandeur. Spirits were predictable like that; their sense of humor and style was very cliché.   
  
Hanna looked around for the other mausoleums. Whoever they were dealing with must be one of the sincere types instead, he figured-- the worst. It was hard to deal with a spirit who took themself so seriously. They didn't appreciate clichés, so you had to play a lot of guess-and-check with them, which Hanna now found himself doing.   
  
He was growing quite irritated, and equally anxious by the time he came across the fourth small building. This one was older, the stone rough-hewn but worn from the years. As he approached it, a shiver ran through him, a feeling that was becoming familiar but no less detestable. Animal instinct told him to run, but he overpowered it like he always had when dealing with dark magic. (He was starting to think maybe he ought to listen to it more; starting tomorrow, perhaps.) Along with the shiver, there was a whisper on the air.   
  
_'Haannnibal...'_ it said, thin and drawn out.   
  
“What do you want?” Hanna grumbled under his breath, sort of hoping he could ignore it.   
  
_'Hannibaaal...'_ The voice was so quiet he almost could have thought he'd imagined it, but it unnerved him just the same. He stopped and looked over his shoulder back the way he'd came. Nothing was there. No one was following him that he could see. (As if that was a guarantee of safety.)   
  
“Ugh, leave me alone,” he said, squinting his eyes against the feeling of the voice invading his mind. It was a terrible, intrusive feeling, and it was doing a damn good job of distracting him.   
  
But then the voice of his guardian angel sounded weakly from behind him.   
  
“...Hanna?”   
  
The fog cleared from his mind instantly, and he whipped his head around to seek out the voice. It came (no surprise to anyone) from the mausoleum, and he ran towards it.   
  
“Alexander!” he yelled, distantly aware that it might be wiser in a time such as this to use maybe perhaps the man's _actual_ name, or at least something he'd recognize.   
  
But there he was, as Hanna rounded the corner and stumbled in through the open door, just as he had been in the water's image. His partner: whole and seemingly-unharmed, leaning against what Hanna could now identify as an immobile marble coffin. Best of all, the man was awake.   
  
“God, are you okay?” Hanna asked, breathless as he rushed forward.   
  
But he halted as the zombie said, “Stop!”, as loud and forceful as Hanna had ever heard from an undead or from his friend. “Don't come closer,” he said, fearful determination in his orange eyes. “There's a spell of some sort. I woke up as... it was finishing it.”   
  
Hanna's hands curled in on themselves, nail digging into his skin in frustration. “What are you talking about?” he asked faintly. He itched to step forward. His partner was _right there_ , not ten feet before him, but he couldn't reach him. _'At least he's safe,'_ Hanna thought. _'Safe-ish.'_ Whole and conscious but... he'd said 'it'. There wasn't a soul around, nothing but that insidious voice and... did the zombie mean what Hanna dreaded he might?   
  
Alexander looked hard at him, as if willing Hanna to understand. “The demon,” he said, proving Hanna's fears. “It took over, and I was lost within it. When I came awake again, my hands were drawing the spell, but I could not stop them.”   
  
“I know,” Hanna whispered to himself. Good god how he just wanted to run in and grab Alexander, take him home, keep the both of them safe. He was desperate to get out of there. But if a demon was here, this was not something he could do blindly, nor by instinct alone. If only he'd _thought_ back before, instead of grasping at base desires and addictions... “Is it still here?” he asked, resisting the urge to look around for it, because it would do no good and he irrationally feared that if he took his eyes off his partner for just a moment that he might not be there when he looked back.  
  
The zombie tilted his head, as much as he could manage of a shake. “I don't know,” he admitted. “I can move again on my own, a little.” He lifted a hand to demonstrate, but Hanna thought he could see the limb trembling. “I don't... feel it anymore, the demon.”   
  
So it was not in him any longer, Hanna surmised. It must be out there, somewhere. Looking, searching for a better host. Whispering, maybe, for the one it really wanted.   
  
“It's looking for you,” Alexander said. He seemed to know just what Hanna was thinking. “Please. Be careful, Hanna. It's a terrible creature. I know it from the inside. I saw everything.” A haunted look came over him, chased quickly by sadness. It was a look Hanna had seen before-- the same look he'd been given when the zombie first opened his eyes. It was very knowing.   
  
'Terrible creature' was something of an understatement, Hanna thought, remembering the demons he'd come across before and the impression he got from them, which there were really just no words to describe. The feeling of them, it was sick, like oil bubbling beneath the skin.   
  
He didn't want to be here, but he couldn't go. _Wouldn't, couldn't,_ and for the sake of everything good in the world, darn well _shouldn't._ “I can't just leave you here though,” he said, eyes still locked on his partner's. The both of them seemed to be willing their thoughts into the other's brain. “Especially not with that _thing_ around,” he added.   
  
“It doesn't care about me,” the zombie reiterated, frowning and looking pained. “ _You_ are the one it wants. Go. Leave me. I will be fine.”   
  
Hanna greatly doubted that Alexander would be 'fine' if he left; it was almost funny in a morbid way that he would suggest such a thing when probably even he didn't believe it (what a martyr this man really thought he was). But he'd said it with such conviction that if Hanna was maybe a little bit more reasonable, less stubborn, or less destructively invested in the zombie's continued existence, he'd have done as the man said and gotten out of there post-haste.   
  
“I can't,” he said, despairingly, because he _was_ so invested. Why did this keep happening to him? he wondered. Sure, he wasn't a perfect person, but if karma or God were to be believed in, he didn't deserve to have been haunted like this for over a hundred years, did he? To have been driven out of his home multiple times? “Where would I _go?_ ” he asked, a rhetorical question if there ever was one, because damn it, he wasn't going anywhere. “I don't wanna be dramatic but, look, there's nowhere in the world that's worth being if you're not there!”   
  
He fully expected that the zombie would open protest again, strong-willed as he was (they both were; god, this was never going to end, and the demon knew that), but the man simply closed his eyes and sighed, a relic of his human life. “I know,” he said.   
  
It seemed then that all the fight and flight bled right out of the both of them. The zombie sagged against the hard stone of the coffin, and Hanna wilted where he stood, and they stared sadly at each other, but with a genuine fondness.   
  
This wasn't going well, but Hanna couldn't help thinking when he saw the edge of a smile on the zombie's face that if they both had to die, well, at least they were on the same page, and here together.   
  
And that, of course, was when the voice returned.   
  
_'You're right...'_ it said. _'You can't leave him again... your love. He means... more to you... than life.'_  
  
“Stop it...” Hanna grumbled, gritting his teeth against the sugar-laced poison of the words.   
  
Alexander pushed himself up to sit straight against the coffin. “Hanna?” he asked, concerned at the troubled look on Hanna's face.   
  
_'You would... do anything to save him?'_ the voice asked, though it was clearly more of a rhetorical thing.   
  
“Almost anything,” Hanna murmured, really not sure why he was even humoring the damn voice, but still struggling to get it out of his brain. He rubbed reflexively at his face, and shook his head like he was trying to rattle it loose.   
  
The zombie was now struggling to get to his feet, his eyes locked on Hanna, clearly aware that something was amiss. (Not that Hanna didn't talk to himself sometimes, but with the situation being what it was...) “Don't listen to it, Hanna,” he said, hoping the dazed-looking magic user could even hear him.   
  
_'Do one thing for us. Just... a simple... spell.'  
  
_ Hanna thought about the lengths to which he'd been willing to go to save his partner before. _Before_ before, and more recently. At this point, he really did think he'd do just about anything to get them both home safe, even if it meant appeasing this greasy-essenced spirit. And... a spell was not that big of a deal. He'd done a billion of them. He figured he could handle another.   
  
“Hanna, please.”   
  
His partner's plea tweaked at his attention, the worry and fear in his voice echoing Hanna's own (or at least, the fear he'd been feeling quite recently; all he felt now was kind of a determination). He decided.   
  
“What do you need me to do?” he asked, and he could feel the voice grinning, sharp teeth showing and hair raised in anticipation. It wasn't especially nice, but he ignored it.   
  
_'Go to the coffin there,'_ it told him. _'Take... the bones.'_  
  
 _'Bones, huh?'_ Hanna thought, a little wheel in the back of his mind spinning through a catalog of ingredients and their uses. Without complaint, he did as the voice asked and approached the coffin. Luckily, he had enough presence of mind to skirt the edges of the spell-circle inside of which still stood his zombie friend. Alexander was talking to him now-- encouraging, he guessed, or maybe concerned... it was a little hard to tell because he couldn't quite grasp what the man was saying. He wasn't much concerned about it. He went along to the back of the mausoleum and approached the coffin from behind, so that it sat between him and his partner, as if one of them was a bartender, and the other a patron. (But who in this scenario would be the bartender? Hanna was better at mixing potions, but shit at making anything edible (except for that one time), whereas Alexander was a great cook and an even better listener. At the moment, though, he was the one who looked like he could use a drink.)   
  
The coffin's marble lid was extremely heavy, but Hanna was sure he could get it open if he just put his back into it a little. But before it had more than cracked open, the zombie called out to him in a frightened but commanding voice, like nothing Hanna had ever heard before.   
  
“Hannibal Falk Cross! Stop!” he yelled in a tone that could halt tidal waves.   
  
And... suddenly... it seemed like the whole world had cleared up, and warmed up. Like everything had been black and white before but somehow he hadn't noticed until it had regained its color. His partner's eyes in particular gleamed brilliantly at him, like fire on diamonds or some-such poetic nonsense that could never quite describe the color justly.   
  
Feeling a little overwhelmed, Hanna staggered back, away from the coffin and into the wall behind him. He wanted to be surprised at himself that he'd let the damn voice convince him, but at this point it was no longer much of a shock. (Not to be self-deprecating, but he recognized how bad his track record was with demons, and he knew how coercive the things could be. Kind of a 'fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on the both of us'.)   
  
The zombie was looking at him in tired relief, as if exhausted by the not-insubstantial amount of worry Hanna had been putting him through. But his expression quickly changed once he realized he had Hanna's attention, back to adamant concern. “Hanna, go now,” he commanded. “Before it tries to get at you again.”   
  
Hanna wasn't keen on obeying, but he recognized that he really ought to. What had he been about to do? What could the demon convince him of if he let it? (And in a situation like this, well, obviously, resistance was futile. And he was an idiot, so.) But still... there was Alexander, standing, staring at him, fully conscious. If he'd just stayed down, maybe the demon would have left him alone, but it would probably tear him to shreds now if he left.   
  
“I'm not asking you to _abandon_ me. I know you wouldn't do that,” he said, as if reading Hanna's mind. (Or, more likely, because he understood Hanna better than anyone else in this world ever had.) “But go, find help. Don't come back on your own.”   
  
As much as he hated it, Hanna knew his partner was right (and not just because he was always right). “Alexander...” he said softly, some sort of plea, a consolation for not being able to reach out to him through the circle.   
  
Alexander laughed, short and quiet but like he hadn't been expecting it. He shook his head and allowed himself a quick small smile.   
  
“W-what?” Hanna asked, smiling reflexively but wondering if maybe his companion had finally cracked.   
  
He waved away Hanna's concern. “Generals,” he said, shaking his head again as if he'd just figured out the punchline of a long and terrible pun. “You were telling me this whole time.”   
  
Hanna laughed, not quite sure what the man was talking about, but _so_ glad to see a genuine smile on his face. He really did adore Alexander, sometimes more than he thought he could explain. But for now he figured the best way he could express that was to do as he asked and get the hell out of there. He came around the side of the coffin and stopped ever so briefly near the edge of the circle, before he continued on out of the mausoleum. “I'll be back,” he said, only glancing over his shoulder at the zombie, sure he'd never get himself to leave if he looked any longer than that.   
  
But as he reached the door and was wondering frantically where he would go and who in the world he could possible get to help, he felt a painful jolt in the back of his head and he stopped.   
  
_'You can't escape.'_  
  
Hanna couldn't say he'd ever had a lobotomy before, but he was pretty sure it would feel something like this. The pain was so intense he could just barely remember falling to his knees before the world collapsed around him and he blacked out.   
  
xXx

  
When he woke... but it wasn't really like waking up. It wasn't like that at all. It wasn't much like a dream, either, where you're suddenly aware of things, like you'd known them all along. This was more like... what he imagined God might have seen during the creation. There was this vast empty nothingness. Everything was nothing. And yeah, the thought was a little nonsensical, even to him, to whatever existed of him in whatever this place was. Or maybe it was more a state of being. There was no him, really, not that he could see. No body, no... memory, not really, and only the barest sense of self.   
  
As he watched, or... became aware, or... _was_ , things swirled out of the mist. Rather, the mist _became_ out of nothing, and then it became... something. And then it became feeling. And then, finally, it became memory.   
  
For the most part, it was a vague landscape of 'had been', like skimming through a history book. But here and there, snatches of thought and moments were clear. They were all to do with magic, images and memories of magic-users throughout the ages. He felt from them a sense of wonder and concentration, feelings he remembered from somewhere. Then the dark mixed in, images of night and the emotion of death and a sort of terrible craving. He remembered these too.   
  
The mad dash through all of time began to slow, and it settled with following after a man. ...A human... but wrong. Maybe not a human after all. The man was familiar... sort of... Like meeting a distant relative of someone you know well. Hanna watched as he worked with the magic, and he taught a young boy, who followed after him with genuine enthusiasm. Eventually, the boy became a young man, and he became more familiar while the older man grew darker and darker, and Hanna became uneasy about him. But the young man couldn't see this; he didn't seem to notice how dark his tutor's ambition had become, how all-consuming, until there was a swirl of shadows and screams one night, and only one of them was left standing. The old man's body was left behind, cold and abandoned in a damp cellar because he'd found something better.   
  
The student carried on, and Hanna watched in rapt horror as three shadows trailed behind him, each darker than the last. He trudged through life, worn down by the weight of the souls he dragged along, though, to an outsider, he'd have appeared peaceful, the very model of a saint. He was the teacher's ambition, the resentment of the student, and the combined knowledge of the three who shared him; but his flock only saw him as a guiding light. They didn't know, like Hanna did, that he was only reaching obsessively toward his goal. Only Hanna saw the lives he destroyed behind the scenes, the blood shed to protect his secret and advance his plans.   
  
Hanna couldn't look away. There was nowhere to look; he was trapped in this ghastly narrative. He knew who he was now, as sure as he knew who this man was, this _'holy'_ man: Father Morris. And he could only watch as the priest ruined lives, a helpless spectator to a cruel sport. When the demon came into his father, he could see now the extra shadows upon it, and when he went to the church, he recognized the wolf in sheep's clothing that greeted him. But there was nothing he could do. He had to watch as his young self trailed along after the demon in disguise.   
  
“Stop!” he wanted to yell. “Don't follow him-- don't _listen_ to him!” But he had no voice, and his young self was too much of a desperate fool to hear even if he had.   
  
Would it have been better, maybe, if someone had caught him at his practices? They'd have locked him up, or even executed him, but they'd have gotten him away from the priest, and they'd have discovered the man's dark secrets. Would that have been better? He didn't know what he'd been running toward, what he should have been running _from_. He watched himself go along with the priest, eager like there was nothing more important in the world. God but he remembered how it had felt-- there really was nothing more important to that lonely, scared child than finding a way to take control over the monsters that threatened him. Only he didn't know that the monster was right in front of him.   
  
When the time came that he finally saw his parents again, he understood with perfect clarity his parents' panic. It was the same panic he was feeling. They had known Morris, and had had an understanding of his secrets that only experience could lend. They weren't afraid of _magic_ ; they never had been. They were afraid of the sort of deranged person who could take their cherished art and pervert it in such a way. They'd known about him, and that's why he'd had them killed.   
  
Young Hanna didn't know this, and he didn't know that the priest was at fault for his parents' relative silence over the matter, their inability to warn him. It was just one little rune he didn't recognize; he had no reason to suspect foul play. He was so naïve.   
  
Yet another thing he didn't know: that when the demon came upon the priest, it was his long-due payment for their partnership. Morris had meant to sic the demon upon his apprentice, but it was clear to Hanna now that it never mattered what you wanted a demon to do; it would always do as it saw fit. He almost pitied his teacher for his greedy ignorance.   
  
His parents couldn't tell him what they knew, and his young self ran, alone and afraid, ignorant but alive. Meanwhile, he floated there in this mist of memory, pulled along after the demon into the horrid void of what he imagined must be Hell. He couldn't understand it, couldn't wrap his head around the space or the time, but he could begin to piece together the puzzle about this terrible creature and its plans. It was no longer his mentor. What little had been left of the man when he knew him was gone, only the emotion of betrayal left behind to fuel the demon's desires. Morris's master, too, had been long-since assimilated into this creature, giving it its ambition. Together, they created a monster hell-bent on revenge. It sought to destroy the one it blamed for its failures: the apprentice they couldn't take-- Hannibal Cross.   
  
Hanna shivered, deadly afraid they would find him here and rip his soul to shreds, but he really was no more than the shadow of a ghost. He had no form, and there was no ground to stand on; he was buffeted by the hot wind of the demon's rage but he went nowhere. He became tired, but there was no way to escape, and hardly a thought to do so. It was still difficult to anchor himself, with nothing familiar to see or hold on to. Similarly, the tiny pieces of human left within the demon had the same problem. On Earth they had been in control, or at least the illusion of it, but now, mired in this never-ending quicksand of nothingness and despair, their humanity dwindled and their envy grew.   
  
Dark eternities followed as it waited, waited for the right time, for the right opportunity, for the apprentice to open himself up again. It knew he would, and Hanna... didn't know anything anymore. He'd lost his way in the pressing emptiness, until the demon finally reached through a crack it had been peering into and cold fresh air poured into him and he could think again. Now he could see what it was doing, the listening and whispering and following like a mist. It was barely a projection of itself onto the living realm, but it was following a plan. It skittered around others, humans it could have taken if it weren't so obsessed. But it didn't want to touch another soul until it had crushed the one it hungered for and felt his despairing essence bleed through it.   
  
Before too long, it had the opportunity. Hanna peered through the cracks at himself and felt his heart shaking, whether from memory or from what he was feeling now, he wasn't sure. His young self, not quite so young anymore but still hardly more than a child compared to him now, was drawing a circle upon the thigh of the mayor's wife's corpse, his hands trembling. Or perhaps it was _his_ hands that were trembling, here in this nether-world. It was only a moment before the demon was in him and the room was covered in blood and Hanna was trailing behind as if chained to it. It was only a moment before he was _killing_ his best friend in the world, and he wondered if this was his punishment for it-- to have to watch this scene over and over from different perspectives. Young Hanna pushed the demon out and they were sucked back into the void to watch hungrily through cracks, but the despair the demon felt from the apprentice was enough to sustain it for eons more, if that was how long it had to wait.   
  
And then they were in the graveyard. Not the one from that night. One Hanna didn't recall having seen... except for in a dream.   
  
“Hanna...” the zombie said, the simple word full to the brim with unspoken thoughts, and Hanna looked up at _himself_ across the grave. _He_ grinned, but it wasn't the gentle or joyful smile he'd have given his long-dead partner. He could see the shadows on _him_ , four-deep and each darker than the last, cast by the faint glow of the stars on this moonless night. Hanna felt the gleeful anticipation from the demon, and just under it a deep yearning loneliness that he knew was his.   
  
The demon waved a hand at the zombie, or so it seemed, a spell Hanna didn't quite understand, and then everything went dark again and they were back in the void for what felt like just one anxious moment, before they were at the mausoleum, which suddenly felt very important. The demon had waited, waited _waited waited waited._ Waited for this day. It had a plan.   
  
Hanna wanted to have some sort of violent physical reaction to everything he'd seen just now, but he had no body to do it with. Rather, he almost had to remind himself, he did have a body; he was _in_ his body, just trapped. And now that they'd caught up with the present, he was stuck in the dark again. This time, there was no soothing voice to distract him, and he couldn't see what was going on outside, though he wasn't sure if that was better or worse than before. At least this time he had control over his own thoughts, and at least now he wasn't stuck trailing after the memory of the demon, waiting for eternities in that terrible void. But he shuddered at the thought that the demon could be out there now, doing _anything_ with his own two hands.   
  
When he thought about it though, it seemed pretty obvious what the demon would be doing. In fact, he could just about hear it whispering, not to him but to itself: _'destroy him, break him'._ It wanted to crush Hanna's soul so it could have his body to itself (classic fantasy necromancer gig, but still horrible despite the cliché), and what would hurt him the most? It had known all this time: kill Christopher Johnson. That name (though the demon didn't think of it quite that way; it wasn't a collection of letters and sounds, it was just a feeling that meant the detective, or the zombie, or whatever he was) was a persistent blight on its ability to take the apprentice for its own.   
  
Hanna shuddered again, hot and cold at the same time. Goosebumps covered the ghostly memory of his skin, and shivers ran all along his spine and nerves and he felt sicker than he could ever imagine feeling before, like his insides were being turned to molten liquid and about to burst right out of him. (A fantastically gross image, but he couldn't appreciate it right now; he really was in a lot of pain.) He hunched over on himself. He couldn't remember what he'd just been thinking about a moment ago, or where he was, or what in the hell was even going on.   
  
And at about the moment when he sincerely thought he was going to die, he blinked back to life instead. Life-- with sights, and sounds, and actual physical feelings. Glorious life! (Though he still felt sick as a dog.) It took him a few moments to readjust to just his involuntary senses: sound, smell, feeling. They all seemed sort of out of whack, because they weren't really telling a coherent story. There were scuffling noises and this sort of ambient 'whoosh' sound all around him, and the smell was just terrible, whatever it was, and aside from feeling ill, there was also this vague pressure on him. Oh, and it was hot.   
  
He opened his eyes, expecting the unexpected, and found he was surrounded by pure fucking chaos-- unexpected, but not the kind of unexpected he'd been expecting.   
  
Still feeling like he'd been electrocuted (although that was just a guess, because what did that even feel like?), Hanna _tried_ to breathe and regain control of himself, but it was hard to catch his breath. He was kneeling on the hard stone floor of the mausoleum, and all around him: bodies. Oh, but not _bodies,_ bodies: corpses. The freshly-exhumed kind, judging by their state of decay and the amount of dirt and mud. A few of them were on fire, and most of them were moving-- crawling, shambling, half-running toward him or toward the other end of the small room. And there, not where he'd been when Hanna had last seen him, but a little to the right, Alexander: literally the most beautiful sight Hanna had ever seen. He stood there in the light of the moon from the mausoleum's small window, bathed in an ethereal white glow, launching _fireballs_ at the other zombies. Hanna seriously had absolutely zero idea how any of this was happening, but it was like a scene from his wildest dreams, or possibly the Dresden Files.   
  
As soon as Alexander noticed that he was awake, and could spare a moment between fending off their attackers, he yelled in his direction. “Hanna, we've got to move!”   
  
Hanna was inclined to agree, though he didn't think his body was. He hadn't realized how much energy it took out of you, being possessed, since the last time he'd just sat in a daze the whole rest of the day. (Neither had been a nice experience, but at least this time he had a reason to really put it behind him and move on.) “Sounds great,” he called back, glad to find his voice was mostly working. “If, y'know, I could move at all.” He just managed to duck quick enough to avoid being swiped at by one of the corpses, so, yes, he could move _at all_ , but little more than that. Lucky for him, Alexander was on it, blasting the thing with a fireball, and though Hanna lacked the strength to twist around and look behind him, he could hear it sizzling.   
  
In moments, his partner was at his side, ducking to scoop Hanna up like he weighed no more than a tiny child (close enough, but not a flattering comparison) and then running the both of them out of there. _'Exit stage left,'_ Hanna thought, _'pursued by zombies.'_ The zombies were indeed following after them, but at such a leisurely undead pace that they probably could have outran them at even a light jog. The corpses' speed had been hard to deal with in the small confined space of the mausoleum, but out in the open it was hardly more than an inconvenience, as long as they kept moving.   
  
On that note, Hanna had to wonder how in the world Alexander was running so damn fast. It wasn't olympic speed or anything, but good lord it was faster than _Hanna_ could run on an average day. And how had he gotten out of the containment circle in the first place? And what was with the zombies?! He wasn't sure where to start with all his questions, so he just blurted out, “Jeezus Christ, what happened?”   
  
Alexander smirked down at him. “I don't think Jesus is to blame for this.”   
  
Hanna laughed, incredulous at his partner's ability to make a joke at a time like this. What a guy. What a ridiculous and generally perfect guy. “Okay, but really,” Hanna said. “I am so, _so_ lost right now. I was-- I was stuck in the demon's mind when it possessed me. It was-- god, I can't believe I never figured it out, that it was-- it was the same one from before and--!”   
  
“I know,” Alexander said, holding Hanna marginally closer. “Your mentor.”   
  
“But how did--?”   
  
The zombie shook his head. He looked like he understood too well to be angry, but not by much, though the almost-anger was in no way aimed at Hanna. “I told you. I saw everything.”   
  
Hanna went cold, though maybe it was only because they were jogging through empty streets in the middle of the night and it was getting quite breezy. “Everything...” he repeated. “Everything the demon ever saw or thought or did?” Which meant everything Hanna had seen while it was in him. All the death, all the darkness, the despair, all the things that made Hanna as messed up as he was today, and the mistakes he'd made because of them. And the loss. Hanna had had years to come to terms with it, but it still hurt. Imagine feeling it all in such a short time. Imagine having to deal with the pain of your own death from two different perspectives. “I'm sorry,” he whispered.   
  
“It's fine,” Alexander told him, and he sounded quite convincing, as though it was not in fact all that traumatizing. “That's why I was able to get out of the circle. I saw the magic.”   
  
“Well,” Hanna said. “Guess that explains the fireballs too.”   
  
But seriously... He'd been able to use complicated spells after seeing them in what amounted to hardly more than a dream? It was incredible that, despite the pain the demon had brought as well, his partner had learned whole _lifetimes_ of magic in one day! Hanna didn't think even _he_ knew how to make a fireball. Although, given what Alexander had just said, he supposed it was probably in his brain somewhere now, if they'd both seen the same things. He figured he'd look into it (because... _fireballs_! Sweet), but later, because he still had more questions, and they were still running from a demon's undead horde. (He assumed the demon was responsible for them; zombies didn't usually just pop up on their own.)   
  
“Okay, but why did the demon let go of me?” he asked, trying to get back on track, and really wracking his brain for an answer to this particular one. “Because, I think it was trying to kill me. I mean, I felt like I was _dying_ , and then it just... left.”   
  
“Oh, sorry,” the zombie said, glancing down at Hanna briefly. “I was trying to exorcise it. I suppose that's how it feels from the inside.”   
  
Hanna nearly choked. “Geez, you freaking _exorcised it?!_ That is _bad ass._ ”   
  
“Don't be too excited,” Alexander said, looking a little uncomfortable. “I'm fairly certain that it will be back.”   
  
It was hard to doubt that. The demon was tenacious. Hell, Hanna had thought it'd been multiple demons throughout the years, but had come to find out that it was just one terrible creature with a grudge the size of Hanna's regrets. There was no way the thing was gonna back off now. It would probably chase them to the ends of the earth. “So that's why you princess-carried me outta there in a hurry, I guess?”   
  
“That,” his partner said, sounding hesitant, “and because of the ...zombies.” He made a face, still obviously finding the word and/or the creatures extremely distasteful. “Before I could remove the demon from your body, it summoned them. I believe it was trying to distract me while it did something with the bones in the mausoleum. An immortality spell of some sort, I think.”   
  
The idea rang true within Hanna's mind, like it wasn't just a guess or suggestion, but a bit of knowledge he'd unearthed from the mass of memory the demon had unwittingly bestowed upon him. That had been its plan all along. And the bones...-- “They were Morris's master's bones,” Hanna mentioned, though mostly to himself as he pieced the puzzle together; Alexander probably already knew. “Destroy the bodies of the other souls, gain their complete power, or something like that. Kind of the opposite of putting a soul to rest...” The idea made him queasy, probably because he knew that it wasn't unlike what the demon likely had in store for him. It was a way to finally guarantee that the men inside the demon truly had no way to escape any longer.   
  
“We'll find a way to stop it,” Alexander said, responding to Hanna's worried tone. He looked a little distracted though, like he was sorting through details in his head, looking for a spell or something he'd read or anything he could find to solve this issue. Hanna knew he ought to be doing the same, but he just felt overwhelmed right now. He kind of wanted to take a nap, although only if he could pretty well be assured that he wasn't going to dream; he was _extremely over_ dreaming.   
  
“So where are we headed anyway?” he asked. He looked around the zombie's shoulder; they were clear of the cemetery, having left it behind more than a block ago, and it didn't seem that any of the other zombies were on their tail. Still, he was glad Alexander didn't slow down. (And Hanna just assumed that it was because of the magic that he was so speedy right now. He didn't want to bother him with more questions at the moment, especially ones he might not have a straight answer to. Maybe they could discuss the logistics of it later, if the weren't both dead and/or possessed.)   
  
“Worth's,” Alexander replied. “Unless you have a better suggestion.”   
  
“Not really,” Hanna said, because where were you supposed to run from demons and zombies to? It wasn't as if Hanna had had the forethought to set up a safehouse or anything (hindsight 20/20, right?). Worth's probably was the most fortified place he knew of, due to the protections Hanna had added over the years, a few of which were at Worth's request, and others which were of his own volition. At least at Worth's, it'd take a creature a few minutes to hack through the wall when the door didn't open for them, unlike his own ramshackle apartment. He wasn't sure if that would keep demons out (honestly? probably not), but for now, having some place that was shambler-proof was gonna have to be good enough.   
  
Considering how late it was (some time after midnight and before morning, anyway), Hanna hadn't really been expecting to be greeted by anyone (despite Worth's relative nocturnality, he did most of his business in the evenings, not the dead of night). He certainly hadn't been expecting to be greeted by multiple people. First and foremost was, of course, Worth. He looked up when they came in, already with murder on his face. “Are you fuckin' kiddin' me?” he said. It wasn't a question in the slightest. Whatever it was that the good doctor was mad about, there was no doubt in his mind that Hanna was guilty of it.   
  
“There's, uh, there's zombies out there,” Hanna said, getting down out of Alexander's arms and motioning vaguely at the door. “Like, bad ones, so we should probably... close the door.” He moved to do that, hyper-aware of Worth's dirty look locked on the back of his head.   
  
“So I been told,” Worth said, enunciating nice and clear so that the apparent idiot that was Hanna could understand him. When Hanna turned around, he got the full strength of the man's glare and almost stumbled back from it. An angry Worth wasn't quite as scary as a demon, but he wasn't a force to be trifled with either. “You got a friend here waitin' for ya. Said you'd be coming with somethin' evil in tow.”   
  
Although Hanna was a little ashamed about bringing the darkness to Worth's doorstep, he was mostly surprised that someone had warned him. “What? Someone's here?” For a split second, his mind ran wild, and he hoped it wasn't actually the demon in someone else's body, laying a trap for them. Then he realized how unlikely that was, simply because the demon was so bad at stringing human words together that it was practically mute when in physical form. Creepy, really, but also a little funny if you thought about it.   
  
“Yeah, yer reaper friend, apparently,” Worth grumbled, motioning for them to follow him out of the foyer and into the main office. “Speakin' of that, din't I tell ya to let me know when you were gonna summon that thing?”   
  
“Well I tried,” Hanna said defensively. “But Conrad said he couldn't wake you up, so it's not my fault.”   
  
Worth made a dismissive 'pfft' noise, seemingly uninterested in pursuing the argument, although Hanna knew what he'd say: something like, “that's whatcha get fer trustin' pansy vampires to do yer work for you”.   
  
When they got to the office, they found Ples, who'd been idly chatting with Lamont while he waited on their arrival. Rather maybe, it was Lamont who was chatting at Ples; the reaper was responding politely, although he did not look nearly comfortable enough to 'chat', if that was something he was even capable of. (Lamont looked fine, but he rarely showed signs of stress, really.) When he noticed them, Ples stepped away from his conversation and engaged Hanna immediately.   
  
“ _This_ was not my intention when I wished you luck finding the demon,” he said, looking rather annoyed and just the littlest bit panicked.   
  
“It wasn't exactly my intention either,” Hanna admitted. “The whole thing really didn't go according to plan. I'm still just trying to wrap my head around it!”   
  
Ples gave the magic user a dubious look. “Should I assume, then, that it wasn't _you_ who stole all those souls?” he asked, in reference to the small army of zombies that were presumably still dogging them.   
  
Hanna grimaced. “Yeah, nnnnnot exactly? I'm, uh, _told_ that it was my body, but I was kinda possessed at the time, so I'm just taking Alexander's word on that.”   
  
In a move that Hanna actually found quite heartening, Ples turned to Alexander for confirmation. True, this was what any person ought to do in a situation such as this, but considering how Hanna knew the reaper felt about the undead, he was a little amazed that Ples apparently thought the zombie human enough to trust.   
  
“It was the demon,” Alexander confirmed with a short nod. “I apologize that I couldn't stop him.”   
  
Ples waved off the apology. “It's of little consequence,” he said. “But I wasn't aware that demons were able to work spells without the help of a magic user.” He turned to Hanna, accusatory.   
  
“They _can't_ ,” Hanna said, a little surprised that he knew this. It was something he'd gleaned from the mass of memory the demon had given him, that they were incapable of doing magic on their own, or even forcing a possessed body to do it for them; that was why they whispered and tempted. Hanna hadn't known this before, but it made sense. It explained why all the deaths the terrible creature had caused were physical, despite it inhabiting fairly powerful mages. Hanna's father hadn't consented to kill his mother; Father Morris certainly didn't consent to kill himself; and Hanna, of course, would have rather died a hundred times than do what it had made him do. “But I didn't help it,” he told Ples. “Not this time. It was my mentor and his teacher who..., uh, fused with the demon and now they're trying to get a body or something?”   
  
“...Surely.” Ples gave Hanna the most deadpan look he'd seen in some time-- quite a feat, really, considering that he was living with a zombie.   
  
Hanna huffed in frustration. “Look, it's hard to explain, but yeah, they raised a bunch of zombies and I'm pretty sure they're still after me and I'm sorry for getting you guys involved but I didn't know what else to do.”   
  
“I assumed as much,” Ples said, nodding, as if that was the consensus he'd been waiting for them to come to. Not that he looked happy about it. “Unfortunately,” he continued, “I doubt whether there is much that we can offer in the way of help. I have very little experience with demons. Misters Worth and Toucey here claim a similar dearth of knowledge.”   
  
“Sorry, Hanna,” Lamont said with a friendly apologetic shrug.   
  
It wasn't that Hanna had expected Worth or Lamont to know anything about demons, so that wasn't a surprise. And honestly, he hadn't been expecting Ples to show up at all. (Well, he'd briefly considered calling him, but he hadn't _decided_ to yet.) But now that he was here, Hanna was a little disappointed that the reaper didn't have _something_ for them. Yes he'd said multiple times that he didn't know anything about demons, but hadn't he just proven that untrue? “Well how did you know demons couldn't do magic then?” he asked, aware that he was sort of grasping at straws.   
  
Ples began to explain, opening with a short sigh. “Magic, as humans know it, is a purely mortal thing. My ...'position' allows me this insight. The shape of a human soul is attuned in such a way that it can interact with magic. A demon's is not.”   
  
“Have you even read a demon's soul?” Hanna asked.   
  
“Demons wear their souls upon their sleeve,” Ples said. “They are nothing _but_ souls. I don't need to touch one to know what it looks like. They are so distinctly different from humans, it is more than the difference between night and day.”   
  
“Then...” An idea came to Hanna, as he considered what it felt like to be in the demon's mind, and the little bits of human he could still see in it. And if that was just what _he_ , a human, could see, then maybe the reaper could differentiate even more clearly. It was a terrible, horrible creature, yes, but the humans were what gave it much of its drive. “If you're so familiar with human souls, do you think you could, y'know, take them out of the demon?”   
  
“What do you mean?” Ples asked.   
  
Hanna thought it might be hard to explain what he'd seen, what he knew, but if anyone was going to believe and understand him on this (other than Alexander), it would be Ples. “The demon, it's not just a demon. The whole reason it's so Hell-bent on my destruction is because it's partly human. I mean, not like it's a half-breed or anything-- it's absorbed human souls, and it's feeding off their desires. I thought maybe, if you could take the humans out, then it wouldn't have anything else to go off of, and then it would be... powerless. Or it wouldn't want to fight, anyway.”   
  
Ples considered it. “What you're saying, I suppose it makes sense, but I cannot assist you with this.”   
  
“What! Can't or won't?” Hanna asked. Honestly he knew this was a lot to ask of someone, even a reaper, but he still couldn't help sounding a little offended.   
  
“Both,” Ples said. “I won't. I've never been one to put myself at risk unnecessarily, and interacting with a demon is no small risk. But even if I wanted to, I highly doubt that I would understand a demon's soul well enough to navigate it.”   
  
“Fine, I get what you're saying, but it's not an unnecessary risk. I mean, would you have showed up here if you didn't think this thing was beyond dangerous? What if it did get to me, and then it decided that wasn't enough and went on to wreak havoc wherever else it felt like?”

  
Ples looked a little apprehensive then, like he'd been caught trying to pretend he didn't care about Hanna's safety above (perhaps illogically) any random person on the street, which they both knew was a huge lie. He cleared his throat and avoided addressing that particular subject, relatively-irrelevant as it was. “It may be necessary to deal with it, yes, but you'll have to think of another way.”   
  
So then Hanna started grasping at straws. To be honest, he didn't know how most of this reaper crap worked-- and he didn't know how the demon crap worked all that well either. He really only had the barest understanding of even his own magic, and it was more like 'well, I do it like this, because this is the way it works' than an actual knowledge of why or how. “Could you... I dunno, go through me? Use me as a conduit? I mean, since I'm familiar with the demon. What if you take me with you? What if you guide me? What if you lend me your powers and _I_ do it?”   
  
Ples looked very uncertain then, but there was a little lightbulb above his head, flickering. (Metaphorically, of course, although if he stood a little to the left some time when the power wasn't out...) “If you're really determined, I could give my powers to someone with a knowledge of the demon, and they could enter it. But it's a very specialized process. I can't _lend_ them. If anything, it would be more of a transference, or a trade.”   
  
Hanna shivered. “You mean... _make_ me a reaper?” He had to admit, that was not something he'd ever considered. He still sort of thought that maybe reapers were just born like that, like... demi-gods or something.   
  
“It wouldn't have to be you, necessarily,” Ples said, as if perhaps he was honestly worried about Hanna's safety. “Anyone who has had contact with the demon could, in theory, do the job.”   
  
“It does have to be me!” Hanna was adamant. It was him who started this mess (er, sort of; it wasn't his fault, per se, but it was more his fault than any other living person's), and it ought to be him who ended it. Besides, he was the only one who knew the demon as well as he did.   
  
Alexander, however, was ready with a protest, and he seemed to know exactly what Hanna was thinking. “I'll do it,” he said. “I know it as well as you do, and if something were to go wrong, then someone like me would be a less significant loss.”   
  
Hanna was shocked. Not that Alexander would say such a thing, because it was totally within his normal range of selfless suggestion, but shocked at the idea. Offended, even, that anybody might think his partner was a more acceptable loss simply because of his undead state. Hanna didn't care about that, and he thought Alexander knew it! “Someone like you?” he said. “You mean, a zombie. You seriously think that just because you died, you're not worth at least as much as me? Out of all the people I've ever known, you deserved death the least, and you definitely don't deserve to die again, especially not for my sake. I care about you, damn it! And I don't want to lose you again. And besides, this is my problem, so stop with the martyrdom and let me do this!”   
  
Apparently, Alexander was stunned, and from the look on his face, a little touched, which might have meant that he was actually super _darn_ touched. He almost visibly deflated as he closed his eyes and nodded his consent (not that Hanna needed it). “Alright,” he said, and gave no further argument, almost a mirror of a conversation they'd had years before, when the detective had ranted at Hanna about not taking his own safety seriously enough. Hanna never wanted his partner to think his life (or whatever it was) wasn't worth a hell of a lot, even if Hanna had to shame him into realizing it.   
  
The others in the room were a little stunned as well, maybe to realize that the cheerful Hanna, who was always joking about serious matters, could actually go off on someone like that. But also they were probably not really sure about the relationship between the magic user and the zombie (even Ples, who _knew_ , at least because Hanna had told him), and hadn't been expecting such a passionate outburst. Hanna would have felt a little embarrassed about it, if things were more normal.   
  
Ples recovered rather quickly. “Your partner is right, though, Hanna,” he said. “This could be dangerous. I cannot guarantee that it will go well for any of us, let alone you, should something go awry. If you're unsure, I could ask Veser instead. I've already primed him to accept many of the responsibilities, and he does have some link to the demon through his reading from the other night.”   
  
“God, no,” Hanna said with a grimace, shaking his head. “The poor kid's had enough weird crap to deal with already. Leave him alone. I can handle this. And... if for some reason I can't, well, at least maybe then the demon will leave the rest of you alone.”   
  
“Hanna...” Alexander said sadly, reaching to hold Hanna's hand.   
  
“Hey, I'm just saying,” Hanna said, shrugging, though he held tightly on to the zombie's hand. Then he turned to Ples. “So, how do we do this? It's not gonna take long, right? Because those zombies could be here any minute.”   
  
“They're several minutes out,” Ples told him. “I cannot speak for the demon, however, so you're right, we ought to do this quickly. Before we do the transfer, we'll need to set a trap for the demon which will, of course, require someone to host it.”   
  
Alexander nodded, and that was just about that, because there weren't a whole lot of other options for who could play that particular role. Worth and Lamont were content to be onlookers (or spotters, if you wanted to be more generous), standing at the edge of the room and occasionally mumbling things to each other, though they did help gather supplies once the others started setting up the containment spell.   
  
The whole thing felt so surreal; almost more dreamlike than Hanna's actual dreams had been. They had Alexander sit down in the middle of the floor, near where the reaper-summoning circle had been the other day, but not on top of it, just in case. Then they laid the circle around him; 'they' meaning mostly Hanna, but with a surprising amount of help from Ples, who still seemed to remember some of the runes and such that he'd accidentally memorized while dealing with Hanna back in the day.   
  
“Maybe you won't find this stuff so distasteful once you're not a reaper anymore,” Hanna suggested.   
  
“It doesn't bear thinking about,” Ples responded, as close as he was going to get to a joke at the moment, and honestly, Hanna could only guess how much of it was really a joke, because Ples had told him next to nothing about this whole reaper-transference thing and it was totally possible that they were both going to die after this was all over-- in which case Ples' statement was a lot less sarcastic than Hanna assumed it was. He didn't spend much time thinking about it though; they were really racing the clock right now. He could almost feel the zombies bearing down on the them, and carrying their horrid master on their backs.   
  
As soon as Alexander was safely confined in the circle, Hanna rummaged through his pockets for two spare death-wards, which he quickly scribbled a rune on in the hopes of converting them to demon-wards. (He was really just pulling ideas out of his ass here, but it was all he had.) These he gave to the two humans in the room. Then he thought about what was left of his own humanity. In theory, if he was understanding Ples right, he wouldn't be at risk of demon possession after they'd done the transfer. The process might leave Ples vulnerable, however, so Hanna made two more of the makeshift demon-wards, one for each of them, just to be safe. Then, to further the effectiveness of the wards, he made what he hoped would serve as a demon-attracting charm and tossed it to Alexander. (He considered squeezing a little of his blood onto it to make the demon that much more interested, but he decided against it, imagining cutting himself in shark-infested waters. Besides, his blood was _all over_ Alexander already, both physically and magically-- a century old but still effective, he was pretty sure.)   
  
Finally, there was only one thing left to do (other than the waiting).   
  
“Are you sure?” Ples asked. “There may be another way. After the demon is caught, we could keep it there until we find another solution.”   
  
“No, I wanna get this done now,” Hanna said, standing up taller and trying to psych himself up. “Unless _you're_ not sure.”   
  
Ples shook his head, looking just a little bit sad, Hanna thought. Or melancholy. Bittersweet. One of those things. He thought he got the point, anyway. “I think it has been long enough,” Ples said, perhaps to himself. “I am ready to do this as soon as you say.”   
  
“Alright, go.” Hanna closed his eyes, unsure what to expect, but blinked them open again when Ples took hold of his shoulders.   
  
“Keep your eyes open,” he told him. “Look at me.”   
  
So Hanna did, although he found it to be rather awkward, because he'd never gotten this, er, intimate with the reaper before. It looked like he was-- or, well, he _was_ trying to stare into his soul. “This is a little uncomfortable,” Hanna mumbled.   
  
“It's going to get worse,” Ples said, squeezing his shoulders to keep him focused and never taking his eyes from Hanna's.   
  
And in a way, it did get worse, though as Hanna began to understand it, he realized it was another example of Ples' cryptic humor.   
  
As Hanna maintained his focus, the room around him darkened, tunnel-vision setting in, until all he could see and all he could think about were the reaper's golden eyes. He felt he was falling into his pupils, although he no longer recognized them as such; they were just dark pits of emptiness, and by peering into them he could see... everything. (It was a little familiar, given what he'd been through earlier that night, though again he didn't quite have the capacity to think about it in such a way.)   
  
To be honest, 'everything' was an exaggeration, but it was a lot. To start with, he saw wisps of what he recognized as magic zooming past him as he fell, and instinctively he grabbed onto each one he could reach, and he could feel them seeping into his heart, and it was kind of... nice? At least compared to what he had to compare it to.   
  
When the magic had stopped catching his attention, he noticed that there were worlds zooming by as well. Not planets, but... realities. He reached out and grabbed on to one and he felt a jerk in the pit of his stomach like he had stopped very suddenly. He oriented himself so that he was standing upright in the world and he watched as two figures talked in a dim lamplit room, a study of some sort with papers and books scattered about in organized chaos. One of the wisps Hanna had taken in was swirling around in his chest and he would have sworn it _made_ him curious. To satisfy it, he reach out into the stale air of the room and grabbed it; the air around his handful of nothing distorted and tore-- not like paper, but like Jello? Water? Smoke? There was nothing like this on earth, made of a matrix that could and would repair itself in slow, seeping, snapping motions.   
  
He dragged it this way and that, and observed what was on either side of this current point, a little like rewinding or fast-forwarding some sort of organic VHS tape. Things he at least vaguely recognized, points in history or moments of personal experience, ran off in both directions, and he studied them until he understood the context of the current moment. In the dimly lit study, it was the sixteenth century, and two tall men stood a foot apart from each other, one's hands tightly grasping the other's shoulders.   
  
“Well _this_ is meta,” Hanna muttered as he watched them stare into each others' eyes and stared into theirs as well.   
  
The familiar one was, of course, Ples; the other, his predecessor. Hanna looked at and through and into Ples and it was almost eerie how much he could see, if 'see' was the right word. He looked at him and he could just _tell_ , as if it was painted on him, what sort of person Ples was-- the sort who always preferred to be alone, but had a genuine unnoticed loneliness underneath; a person who held himself to a high standard but never expected it of anyone else; a man who wanted to understand others on a personal level but whose greatest skill in life was professionalism.   
  
The situation changed then, Ples fading out of this time and into another and Hanna following after him-- but not strung along like he had been with the demon just before. He found that, in stark contrast to that, he was fully in control of where and when he went. And aside from that, he _wanted_ to follow the reaper, to satisfy this need that vibrated in his heart (or wherever it was).   
  
Hanna followed Ples through the centuries, watching as he went about his business of pulling the souls out of the bodies they no longer belonged in (or the houses they haunted, or what-have-you). He leaped after him in a mostly-chronological way (and skipping through the early-mid 1800's entirely, because damn did he ever _not_ need to see that scene a _fourth_ time) until the both of them ended up in a time and place that Hanna recognized as 'here and now'. They stood in what seemed to be Worth's office, although nobody else was around.   
  
“And this is where it ends,” Ples said, although he appeared to be speaking more to himself than to Hanna.   
  
“Hey, an end is just another type of beginning,” Hanna quoted, though from what exactly he couldn't remember. “Or, y'know, something like that.”   
  
Ples hummed, but neither agreed nor disagreed. Instead he asked, “What do you think so far?”   
  
Shrugging a little stiffly, Hanna said, “Eh, it's fine, I guess. A little weird. My chest feels... kinda strange. Sort of like when you hiccup and get a pocket of air stuck in there somewhere.”   
  
“I'm not sure I know what you mean,” Ples responded, although he didn't seem to really want to either.   
  
“Oh. Well. I'm sure it won't be a big deal,” Hanna said. “Not that it would matter if it was. I'd still do it. I have to.”   
  
Ples nodded. “I'm glad you feel that way, because I believe we're already past the point of changing our minds. It's nearly time for us to return. Do you feel it?”   
  
Hanna thought for a minute. He looked inside himself and tried to focus on that new feeling that had attached itself to his every individual cell over the centuries he'd spent following along just now. It still wasn't entirely obvious, but the more he focused, the more he could see how much had changed in him. Then he looked _forward_ with that new knowledge, or _out_ or something, and he could see that Ples was right. The restless souls of the dead were clambering at their door (whether literal or metaphorical, he couldn't tell), and the demon was nearby. “You're right,” he said, grimacing a little because being able to feel the presence of others was awkward at best. “We'd better get out of here.”   
  
“Indeed.” Despite what he said, however, Ples didn't seem all that eager to guide the two of them out of their strange little safe zone. He looked earnestly at Hanna and asked, “Before we leave... Is there anything you feel the need to ask me?”   
  
It wasn't that Hanna was super confident about his newfound abilities or anything, but he figured he'd just wing it until he ran into an issue, which was pretty much how he tended to run with any new situations. “Nah,” he said. “Maybe if we get some spare time we can go over the finer details later. For now, I just wanna get this over with.”   
  
Ples sighed, but didn't express whatever concerns he was feeling. “Of course,” he said, rather unconvincingly, then took hold of Hanna's shoulders once again. Hanna looked into his eyes and thought he seemed wearier than normal, which was sort of a feat in itself. He looked harder and found that he could really _see_ Ples' apprehension.   
  
_'Will I be around to train him?'_ he heard the nearly-ex-reaper say, though he didn't open his mouth once. He saw a quick glimpse of the man who had come before, the one who gave Ples his powers, and there was a sort of montage of before and after images and the feelings that went along with them, where the man was standing before Ples and making what felt like assurances, followed by scenes where the man was nowhere to be found, and Ples was left alone in quiet, nebulous solitude, wondering what had become of the both of them. But Hanna shook the vision from his head; there was too much else to worry about right now, and he could only hope that Ples' fears were unfounded. He focused again on Ples' gold eyes; they were faded to hazel with just the smallest spark left in them.   
  
“Let's go,” he said, and pushed them in the direction that Ples was steering, back towards the world where everyone else and all their mortal problems waited for them.   
  
As they jolted back to the present time, Hanna found them standing awkwardly in Worth's office, exactly where they'd been when they left, exactly where they'd stood just a second before, in the nether-time. Ples' hands still clutched Hanna's shoulders, though now the vigorous grip seemed to be for his own sake. He looked ill, and Hanna could feel him trembling through that small physical connection.   
  
“Hey, you okay?” Hanna asked, feeling weirdly attached to Ples now (though not in any way that was awkward or unexpected).   
  
Ples staggered back from Hanna, doing his best to stand on his own. “I'm sure I'll be fine. Mortality will take some time to adjust to. But you have something else to focus on.” He turned tiredly to the door, and Hanna could read the look on his face perfectly, whether by practice or by his new abilities: it was an almost-appreciated irony over the fact that he might be killed by zombies as soon as he became human again.   
  
Indeed, there was a _terrible_ noise or... something like that, coming from the other side of the door, and it was followed very quickly by an actual audible sound which was pretty clearly zombies trying to knock down a door. He couldn't spend too much time thinking about how to classify that 'noise' when it didn't fall into any of the usual senses, because he knew the zombies were just a distraction. He turned to Alexander, always his lighthouse in stormy waters or somesuch equally trite cliché, but the man was doubled over in unmistakable  pain.   
  
Honestly, Hanna was getting pretty tired of the whole being sucked into peoples' souls thing, and he really hoped that this whole reaper gig wasn't going to be like that all the time. _'I think I can handle one more though,'_ he thought, approaching his partner cautiously. _'And third time's the charm, right?'_  
  
It seemed that there was an active war going on in Alexander's body, and the demon side knew it was losing. 'Alexander' lashed out at him without any sort of aim or focus, clearly annoyed that it had been tricked.   
  
“Nah, I don't think so,” Hanna told it. “I think you're done being a pain in our ass.” Gingerly, he reached into the ring, just to make sure he could, and when nothing stopped him, he did as Ples had done to him (though he figured it probably wasn't necessary) and grabbed on to Alexander's shoulders and _reached._   
  
Not unexpectedly, he was transported (in his mind, he had to guess) to a bleak mostly-empty space where scenery and landscape were nothing more than shadowy suggestions, and a sort of fog swirled around everywhere. “Why are souls _like_ this?” Hanna asked nobody. “Who do I have to talk to to get this fixed?”   
  
Other than the mist and general emptiness, the first thing Hanna saw after he turned around was the detective wrestling with the most god-awful creature he'd ever seen or imagined. It was all dripping blackness and bits of bone and sharp teeth and the occasional glowing red eye, surrounded by a thick smog that emanated from it, kind of like a horribly ugly ogre was being eaten alive by a pile of sentient tar. And it smelled like rotting, which was dumb because they were _inside_ a soul and what the hell use did they have for a sense of smell here?   
  
“Hanna!” the detective called, not taking his eyes off the nasty thing he was grappling with. “Did it work?”   
  
“The reaper thing?” he yelled from several yards away, not terribly willing to close the distance. “Yeah, I mean, I guess so.”   
  
“Good,” the detective said. He tore what looked like it might have been an arm off of the monster and threw it to the ground, where it sizzled. “I'll keep this one busy. You grab the others!”   
  
“Uh, are you sure you don't need help?” he asked, not super keen on the idea. The detective was his best friend and etcetera though, so he'd dive right into the middle of the sludge pile if he needed him to. He just hoped he didn't need him to.   
  
“I've got it for now,” the detective said, even as he was splattered with tar. “--if you hurry!”   
  
So Hanna did that. Or he tried to, at least. The problem was, even with his new reaper abilities, he had no idea where the other two souls were. What was he supposed to look for? Listen for, maybe? According to what he'd gleaned while in Ples' head-space, souls were sort of hard to ignore, but right now the only thing that was hard to ignore was the elephant-sized demon in the room and the way globs of black goo flew off it when it swiped its arm at the detective.   
  
“God, okay, think!” Hanna told himself. “The souls have been with the demon for hundreds of years. They wouldn't have just run off, right?” He scanned the distance, but he didn't think there was anywhere to _go_ , even if they were so inclined. It seemed way more likely that they would stick near the demon, or maybe even were part of it... Hanna grimaced as he looked at it again. Well, there was a lump there on its back, and one on its side that looked like they could be humans?   
  
He didn't notice the shadows until they'd slithered up, wrapped their hands around his ankles, and pulled. He hit his head hard on the non-existent ground and yelped as they dangled him in the air.   
  
“Wow, this is really undignified!” he yelled at them, struggling to keep his head above his chest, even though he wasn't really sure that blood flow was even a thing in this place. (His head felt like it was.)   
  
He'd kind of been expecting some sort of response from them, but he got nothing, not even a hiss or a whisper. They really were just shadows; they didn't even have glowing red eyes or anything. But despite being just shadows, which typically weren't considered corporeal or tangible, they were strong enough to whip him around in the air and make him want to lose his scattered and covered hashbrowns. One of them let go of his ankle and grabbed a wrist instead, and they pulled at him like he was rag doll.   
  
Without thinking about it, he reached into his pocket and grabbed a handful of disorienting dust, always his go-to when someone was hassling him. He threw it at the shadow that was holding his other wrist and would have been surprised that it made the shadow let go and back off (because a. inside a soul, and b. shadow has no body) if he'd been thinking about it logically. It did make him realize, however, that magic might work here, which he hadn't considered before. He threw the rest of his dust at the shadow holding his ankle and vaguely regretted it when it dropped him and he hit the ground on his back. He scrambled up as quick as he could though, trying to keep his eyes on his adversaries.   
  
The shadows were, as one might expect, attached to the demon at roughly the feet-area, though they clearly weren't bound by its movements. They stretched much longer than it was tall, and moved entirely on their own. And, unlike what one might expect, they were three-dimensional. It made some sense, Hanna supposed, if you just thought of them more like ghosts, which was probably a more accurate description of them anyway. (But they really did look like shadows, and so he continued referring to them as such.)   
  
At the moment, the shadows were still reeling back from his attack, but he could see them composing themselves and getting ready to come at him again, so he grabbed the Sharpie out of his back pocket (he was glad to find that it and his other belongings had transcended physical form) and began to scribble wildly over his hands and arms. A quick shock spell here, a messy barrier there, and the piece-de-resistance, a trapping rune on his palm (still healing from his dumbassery the other night; honestly, what the fuck, Hanna?) because even though Ples had not seemed to have any problems with rounding up souls, even in the beginning of his reaper-hood, Hanna didn't think he'd ever dealt with any quite like this, who clearly did not want to go. He had a feeling they were going to be slippery.   
  
The shadow souls slithered around and tried to flank him, but Hanna was prepared. When one grabbed at his ankle again, he punched it straight in what he thought might be its face, the offensive spell he'd scrawled over his knuckles sending it flying.   
  
“Holy crap,” he said to himself. “This is the greatest idea I never had.” He regretted that he hadn't considered it before-- tattooing runes on himself probably would have ruined his unassuming image, but it would have been cool as hell.   
  
The second shadow didn't hesitate when it saw its partner get its ass kicked (apparently none too bright after being reduced to base emotions), and rushed up to Hanna just the same. It swiped at him, but he blocked it with his barrier'd arm and reached up with his trap-hand to grab it by its... well he wasn't sure what it was, but he grabbed it by it and it couldn't get away. With his free hand, he mimicked the plucking strumming motion he'd seen Ples do, focusing on how damn bad he wanted this thing to just hurry up and go to hell or wherever it was going to end up. The shadow began to dissipate as its essence was sucked into a little ball in his palm, until there was nothing left of it but a smoky little orb that Hanna held.   
  
He looked at it, truly in awe. He'd done this. He'd taken this horrible spirit and balled it up into this beautiful little sphere. It was so much calmer now than it had been before. The harder he looked at it, the better he could see it. This... was Morris. He could see the man he had once been, and he could see further and better than he'd seen him when he'd been tagging along with the demon. There was so much more to this man than what Hanna had known either when he was a child, when he idolized him, or when he was stuck trailing after the demon and had wished his destruction. He was a complex individual, a soul like no other. Hanna could see so clearly now how much Morris had wanted to better the world when he was young, his passion for life and the work he did with the church. _God_ , and then he'd simply trusted the wrong person, much the same as Hanna had himself, and all of his goodness had been buried-- and it made Hanna so furious! This man, who'd been like a parent to him, had deserved better. This _soul_ , who had so much potential to do good (and good for goodness's sake, not for his own personal gain, as he _had_ done), was tortured and destroyed because of his tutor's blind ambitions. It wasn't fair!   
  
“I'm sorry,” he told the little soul, though he didn't know if it could hear or understand him. “And for what it's worth, thanks. I know some of what you did was still you.” He took a deep breath and spun the orb in his hand. It vanished, and he could only hope that where it went was better than where it had been.   
  
_'Now,'_ Hanna thought, trying to tamp down on the boiling rage he felt. _'Now for the other one.'_ He didn't have to look hard to find it. The shadow was racing toward him, arms outstretched and aimed for his neck. “I don't think so,” he said, grabbing it as soon as it came within range and clamping down hard with the trap rune. He didn't give it a chance to struggle; he pulled its essence into his palm, harshly, until it was like a lumpy rock in his hand. He gave it just a cursory glance-- _magic user, teacher, ambitious and clever--_ because he knew that if he looked any harder he'd find a reason to pity it, and forgiveness was just not in his game plan right now.   
  
“You started this,” he told it, already feeling a little bad for it, a little less angry the more he held on to the stone. Before the feeling could fade any further, he crushed the rock-- it exploded into a fine powder-- and threw the dust to the ground, where it dissolved and was gone.   
  
He took a moment to catch his breath, though he wasn't sure if it was the fighting, the reaping, or just the sheer emotion which had worn him out.   
  
Several tens of murky yards to his right, the detective was still grappling with the demon's massive tar-ogre form, but as Hanna rushed over to help, the thing... stopped. It ceased its struggling slowly, like it had just realized it no longer remembered why it was even fighting. The detective took the opportunity to extricate himself from the oozing mess, staggering back a few feet and shaking the goo off of his limbs. It splattered to the ground like mud.   
  
“Should we assume this is a good thing?” he asked.   
  
Hanna sure hoped so, but he didn't have any experience with demons that were like _this._ It was just standing there now, looking around the empty landscape with a vague curiosity (or so Hanna had to assume, since it didn't have a face). “We probably shouldn't assume anything,” Hanna said, “but here's hoping.” Cautiously, he approached it, one step at a time, and was still a little surprised when it didn't attack even once he got within friendly-conversation distance.   
  
Playing by ear, Hanna raised his hands to it, palms out as if he was channeling energy or something like sorcerers did in movies. Was this at all necessary? He had no idea, but it felt like it might be a good idea so he went ahead with it. Without closing his eyes (mostly because he was honestly still too freaked out by the thing to let his guard down around it), he focused and looked into it. He both _was_ and _wasn't_ surprised by the absolute lack of defining features he could glean from it. This demon... there was just... nothing left to it, now that the human souls were gone. It was weird, for sure; it still had a slimy feel about it that Hanna could tell without having to touch it at all, but there was nothing left. No name, no discernible desires, no history. Everything he'd seen in it before, when he'd tagged along in the mausoleum, all of that had belonged to the humans, to either Morris or his teacher. It was like the three of them had been living in a symbiotic relationship-- or a parasitic one, depending on what you thought their real needs were.   
  
All-in-all, the demon was now hardly more than a giant insect. A worm, maybe-- gross, but basically harmless. Even so, it really had to go. Regardless of if it had _intended_ to fuck up their lives as it had, it _had_. It had been the cause of all of this, the one thing that had enabled the humans involved to make such evil decisions, because Morris' teacher could have been the biggest dick of all time but if this demon hadn't given him power then the worst he'd have done was probably become a politician or something. Instead, he'd ruined and maimed and killed everything that was important to Hanna. So, the demon had to go. Whether it died or went back to Hell or whatever, it didn't matter, as long as it got out of Hanna's life for good.   
  
(At very least, it definitely couldn't stay in the detective's body, hell no.)   
  
Unsure what good it would do, but without many more ideas, Hanna latched onto the essence of the demon, and reached, and pulled. He could feel that it was working, but it was heavy, and it took what felt like it could have been ten straight minutes of yanking before he had a good nasty double-handful of demon soul. He couldn't get it to form up properly into an orb like Morris' soul, or even into a chunk of junk like the other one, but after a short while he had it about as compact as he thought he was gonna get it.   
  
_'Now what the heck do I do with it?'_ Hanna wondered. His first instinct was to crush it, but it seemed indestructible. He couldn't 'vanish' it like he had with the orb. (And he still wasn't sure where they went when he got rid of them like that. Was he gonna have to go back and sort through them all later? Maybe he'd get Veser to help him out with it.) The only thing he could think to try was to take it... somewhere. Back where it belonged, or far away. He didn't exactly know what that meant, but still he got the feeling it was something he was capable of.   
  
The demon soul took up both of his hands, so Hanna skipped the physical motions he'd made before and just made a tear in the fabric of space-time or whatever it was simply by thinking about it. It worked fine, so he figured the gestures were just for flair, like with most magics. Or for beginners, that sort of thing. Before he began to sort through the eras and layers of maybe-existent multiverse, he looked back over to the detective and gave him a swift nod.   
  
“Well, I'm off to take this thing back to Hell, I guess. You... think you're gonna be okay?”   
  
“I should be fine,” the detective replied.   
  
“Right. Well, then.” Hanna shuffled the demon in his hands, rather grossed out by the texture of it and ready to have it gone, but hesitant to leave the detective again. He didn't have any other options though, so he pushed aside that twinge of worry and the melancholy it was painted with. “Guess I'll see ya on the other side.”   
  
He turned to the tear to begin sorting through it before his apprehension could get the better of him, but before he could get anywhere, the detective had approached him and grabbed lightly onto his sleeve. “Hanna, wait,” he said, and as soon as Hanna faced him he found the detective kissing him gently-- a warm, human goodbye. “I forgive you for everything that's happened. I know you only wanted what was best for us. I love you.”   
  
Hanna felt the breath disappear from his lungs in quiet surprise. The part of his brain that managed speech stuttered to find the appropriate reaction, and several hundred trite and contrite phrases raced toward his tongue, but in the end, the only one that was remotely good enough was that simple truth he'd never managed in better circumstances. “I love you too,” he said, and pretty much everything after that was a big ol' blank because all his brain could do for the next however-long was coo cutely at him in a way that would be vaguely nauseating if it wasn't so euphoric.   
  
So the details were not exactly clear to him, but he entered the space-time tear, found the place whose sound-feel matched the demon's, and left it there, thinking, _'alrighty, job well done'._ Then he meandered home, his brain still floating in a fog of happiness and relief and _lightness_ because finally he was free. (The brain fog also had something to do with adjusting to his new Reaper-ness and trying to wrap his consciousness around time travel, but he didn't really link the two until later.)  
  
xXx  
  
When he finally got home, it was morning. _Late_ morning, judging by the light streaming through his tiny bedroom window. He stretched and yawned and stretched again, and felt more weirdly normal than he could remember feeling for quite some time, and rested like he'd just got a good night's sleep after a good long workout-- still tired, but in a comfortable way.   
  
With surprisingly little effort, Hanna removed himself from his blanket-cocoon and stood to greet the day, not dizzy, not annoyed to be awake, not longing to return to bed. He felt... powerful. Hell, he felt like he could probably even cook a decent meal. To that effect, he walked out into the living room-kitchen, where he was maybe twelve percent surprised to see his zombie roommate.   
  
Everything came rushing back to him, but for once it wasn't painful. He remembered the words they'd exchanged last time they'd seen each other, and Hanna was pretty sure the sun responded by getting brighter because even his sparse ugly windowless living room seemed to glow.   
  
“Hey,” he said, after he watched Alexander scroll through internet articles for a minute. (But maybe he needed a new name now. Something modern? Not that there weren't plenty of generals left to choose from, but the joke was over with and it was time to move on. Maybe Zander? Z's were cool, and it was close enough to Alexander to be an easy transition.)   
  
Zander looked up in surprise and nearly dropped the laptop, but he was sitting on the couch instead of perched on the arm (he'd bunched up a spare blanket underneath him to make the springs tolerable), so it only slid sideways off his lap onto the cushions when he stood abruptly.   
  
“Hanna!” Stepping over the laptop's power cord carefully but with haste, the zombie rushed to Hanna's side and reached to hold on to his arms, thumbs caressing him subconsciously. “You're alright! What happened?”   
  
Not entirely sure how to answer that question, Hanna laughed. “I'm not really sure. Last thing I remember was being in your head. The rest of it's kind of a blur. Did you carry me the whole way back from Worth's?”   
  
The zombie shook his head, and Hanna could see that he'd been worried. “No,” he said. “After you left to dispose of the demon, I woke in Worth's office. You weren't there. Apparently your body had disappeared when you came into my mind.”   
  
“Huh,” Hanna said. “That's... well I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. Ples used to teleport all the time.” Still, Hanna had expected his body to stay when he threw his consciousness elsewhere, because teleporting and dematerializing were completely different things. Did this mean he didn't really even have a body anymore? It still _felt_ pretty real to him.   
  
“He said there was likely nothing to be worried about,” the zombie continued. “Even so.”   
  
“Yeah, how _is_ Ples?” Hanna asked, hoping the ex-reaper was doing okay after all that commotion.   
  
The zombie shook his head. “How are _you_?”   
  
He moved his hands to Hanna's face, and Hanna could see the raw emotion in his expression, at least on par with the man's more expressive moments when he'd been living. He looked like he was having a bit of trouble fully coming to terms with the ordeal, and Hanna almost had to consciously remind himself that he wasn't the only one who'd been subjected to entire lifetimes of pain just within the past calendar day. He sighed and leaned into Zander's hands. They weren't warm, but they were still soft and nice.   
  
“I'm fine,” he said. “I promise.”   
  
Zander wasn't entirely convinced. “You were gone for four days.”   
  
“Jeez, really?” Hanna _did_ kind of feel like he'd slept for several days straight, so it wasn't as surprising as it might have been, but still, four days seemed like a long time to be lost in the ether.   
  
The zombie nodded. His fingers tickled the short hairs at the back of Hanna's head. “Are you sure you're well?”   
  
Hanna dragged his companion's hands down, holding them in his own. “Yes, I'm sure,” he said, squeezing one hand. “I mean, yeah, I feel a little weird, but it's nothing I can't handle.”   
  
“What's different?”   
  
Hanna thought about how to explain it, but he didn't have to think very hard; the new feeling was, as Ples had warned, a little hard to ignore. “I can feel souls. Just, out there, everywhere. It's kinda like being able to hear the traffic down on the street. You know how it was, in the mornings with everyone rushing around. Except now it's in my head.”   
  
Zander smiled sadly down at him. “I'm sorry,” he said, though it sounded just as much like 'thank you'.   
  
“It's alright,” Hanna said, returning the smile without any ounce of sadness. Maybe his partner didn't fully believe him, but Hanna was well and truly happy now, even with the wriggling souls pestering his peripheral senses. The demon was gone. Good lord, it was finally gone and the two of them could rest easy for maybe the first time in their adult lives.   
  
What was more, Hanna's new ability granted him one extra boon: he could see the beautiful warm soul that resided in his companion, and it was real, and it was alive, and it made him the happiest necromancer-turned-reaper ever to have lived.   
  
So maybe Zander still wasn't quite sure that Hanna was as alright as he claimed, but he seemed satisfied for the moment, at least. “What will you do now?” he asked.   
  
“I dunno,” Hanna said, casting around for some clue. “Reap, I guess.” He could feel the souls all around him, and this stinging compulsion to do something about the greying ones. “But, y'know, I'll treat it like a day job. I can't leave my clients hanging just because I became a supernatural on a whim.”   
  
“And what should I do?”  
  
“Stay?” Hanna suggested. “If you _want._ I mean, I could still use a partner, and I hear you've got experience in that sort of thing.”   
  
“I suppose I do,” the zombie said, and the two of them smiled stupidly, completely enamored with each other and the way the situation had somehow turned out. Basking in the glow of what seemed, finally, like a happy ending, they kissed.  
  
It was a nice, long kiss, the likes of which they hadn't had the opportunity for before, and Hanna was just realizing that his new questionably-corporeal body apparently didn't require consistent amounts of oxygen anymore when there was a 'meow' at their feet.   
  
“Oh,” Zander said, breaking the kiss and looking down. “It showed up while you were gone. I think it's the one from the grocery store.”   
  
Hanna laughed, pleasantly nostalgic over being interrupted by a cat. “Huh. It's been a while since I've had a pet. What do you think? Mind if we keep it?”   
  
“Not at all,” the zombie said, reaching down to pick it up. It began purring immediately, clearly as in love with the man as Sith and Sabo had been. (Because Hanna's cats had impeccable taste, of course.) “Will you name it?”   
  
“Yeah. How 'bout... Binks?”   
  
The zombie frowned and raised an eyebrow a little, his patented 'I'm not getting that reference' look. “What does that mean?” he asked.   
  
“Oh, it's, uh... It was a cat from this movie,” Hanna explained, closing his eyes in mild embarrassment. “God I keep forgetting how woefully uneducated you are about modern media. Well, I guess that settles it: movie night!”   
  
So they went and plucked all the extra blankets and pillows off of Hanna's mattress and piled them on the couch (a move that seemed obvious in retrospect but hadn't occurred to Hanna before, for some reason), and had a Halloween movie marathon, which was only interrupted a handful of times by Hanna's new insatiable need to deal with a few particularly annoying souls that kept calling out to him, and a few more times by Binks demanding that someone give him attention (which Hanna was only too happy to).   
  
The _rest_ of the time, the two of them sat cuddled up next to each other, holding hands like the dumb mushy couple he'd always wanted them to be. It was probably going to take him a while to get used to this reaper thing, but when he laid his head on Zander's shoulder, he could feel his long-lost companion's soul swirling softly around inside of him, so no matter what they'd gone through to get here or what they might have to deal with in the future, Hanna had no regrets.   
  
It was more dream-like than a dream. It was a world apart from the long, lonely life he'd been living. It was a second chance he wasn't sure he deserved but damn if he wasn't going to take it. It wasn't glamorous, and it wasn't uncomplicated but, all in all, it was pretty perfect.   


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SEVEN MILLION THANK-YOU'S TO EVERYONE WHO HAS READ THIS! I love you guys, and I love this fandom, and I appreciate every bit of interaction this fic has generated! If you have anything to say or ask, critiques or opinions or maybe you just want to cry about HINABN in general, please please leave me a comment! ALSO, you can visit MY TUMBLR: http://eloarei.tumblr.com/ where I will oh-so-happily talk to you any time!   
> Also also, here's a link [to be added] where I blab about the process of writing this behemoth, the possibility of epilogues, and my sprawling Rogue playlist.   
> And of course, an extra thank-you to the people who helped me endure this 2+ year process, as well as Tessa Stone, without whom this couldn't exist. Thank you!! <3


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